Island Sanctuary

[Tehmon]

This is exactly it. And everyone who is begging to differ, kinda tells me they didn't run full speed into that wall last moment. God forbid they got excited over the outfits you could get too and spent their tokens buying that, not knowing you need 1k per expansion. I spent hours the other night leveling from one rank to the next, thinking "surely with how long it takes to level you'll get a decent handful of tokens once you rank up." Nope. You get diddly squat.

I would have rather the Island been a new form of the Diadem and something to actively help crafters/gatherers.

Yeah, the game becomes unbelievably stingy with rewarding you with cowries, thus making the whole '' let me go absolutely ballistic with my grind so I can level up the sanctuary with just gathering '' feel inane because leveling up the sanctuary at a certain point just means more timegated junk you need to do and more cowries you need to have to expand. So why bother grinding when I'm not rewarded with anything? Oh, I can go gather new materials and can craft 1-2 more items, cool, neat, whatever.

Three-four full instances of doing Diadem will at least give you max skybuilder's scrips so you can buy a mount reward.
Two weeks of doing the ShB-EW daily/weekly hunts every day will net you enough kupo nuts to get the big mount reward, plus it's an excellent addition to leveling levels 70 to 90. And you get some gil as well.

Island Sanctuary on the other hand, it just feels like I'm loosing time, materials and cowries that I could've just used to buy the cute shorts and get out lol.
What Island Sanctuary needs is a daily/weekly quest system that rewards you cowries, experience and/or materials. That would be a good first step.