It was? Where? You are the first person i've seen saying that they thought the first DL live was the only one. Everyone else was expecting the DL lives to continue on a regular basis, maybe only one per month, but where is the downside of having 3 a month (unless you want every last item in the game for some reason)? From what i have seen most people were thinking "so they want to keep people playing this game for a long time by using the DL lives" when they read about the first one.
I think you were just reading/interpreting things incorrectly and jumped to conclusions.
You aren't helping your case.
I'll name some very valid reasons why you'd want the entire available item set.
Cataloging (Which is what I do, but fortunately I'm more or less it), Video creation, M@D/Mixtape creation, and other derivative works.
You know, the little things that keep the presence of im@s on niconico a thing. Which in turn drives the entire fanbase.
How DL lives are going to pan out by math is a very important point, and as people do the math (even subconsciously or by instinct) a LOT of them are going to abandon any attempt of using PS as part of their production, even though by any definition of the word, PS is a significant improvement over OFA!
Like I said, based off the math and what data I can collect, short of you winning the lottery, you're expected to do 84 hours of live play PER DL live to stand even odds on getting all the accessories.
You could argue you can cherry pick (not all accessories are the same of course) but you STILL have to play the gauntlet - you can't pick which accessories you GET FIRST! If there is, please let us know, because any attempts to rig the present drops would be VERY useful right now.
If your counter argument is 'Well, you can pay for p-drops to do that' the counter reply is 'No you can't, because even if you skip the step of making a gold present drop, you are running a 1/6 (Assuming you don't get glitched and get a random E-F costume or accessory) chance of getting one, because you cannot force more than 1 gold present drop even IF you use 200 p-drops (Which is I might add 60x 3 at 5k yen each + we'll say 20 x1 at say 1 for 2k yen) to do so!
(And to add further insult to injury, it's entirely possible (if relatively unlikely) that 200 p-drops (Which is the maximum) will result in NO gold present dropping period.)
The game (as it isn't an artificial AI) can't tell if you're in it for MAD, cataloging, or just to enjoy the selection, which means it can't pick who to grace with luck (and I mean it in the absolute sense of the word) because of the lack of a floor (because previous performance does not affect future performance).
In short?
Decent design - incredibly bad execution, because they assumed the fanbase would play the game to infinity lives. It's incredibly bad design, because even the likes of ACTUAL slot machines (Which I might add are gambling in every sense of the world) are actually coded to be within 0.0001% within a million spins (depending where in the world you are) with a predefined payout percentage.
That's never going to happen, and unlike actual slot machines (or your average MMO) your average PS player isn't going to get remotely close to infinity (or even a thousand or so) lives in 6 months, and I'd say the median won't even do more than a few hundred.
In short? One standard deviation of unlucky is going to adversely affect the quality of gameplay. Your rough gameplay times to get one DL live unlocked will increase by roughly 33% (on a 84 hour expected, that's only another what, 28 hours of gameplay.)
Sounds okay, until you realise that one deviation is roughly 25% of the entire fanbase by definition of statistics. The second deviation will encompass about 35% or so.
In short? If I'm the median (as based off my numbers) you're expected to do 100 hours of lives to unlock just one of the DL lives' accessory set if you fall into that band..
Don't know about you, but if I heard 100 hours of im@s songs, I don't want to do it in all in one sitting, without eating, sleeping or doing anything else.
Of course if you don't do it all in one sitting (Like anyone who needs sleep, for instance doesn't) you're expected to do so over say a few months.
Then you realize that there's another 11 of them you need to do it for.
Yeah, I think they vastly overshot the expectations of anything close to 'complete' to some number they didn't really think about, probably because they didn't read the number out loud and actually thought about what that actually requires.
Which in turn actually hurts the derivative works, which in turn hurts its niconico presence and fan participation.
Basically, you're looking at it from a purely consumptive, as opposed to derivative, perspective. Derivative works is where the design has knock on consequences, and due to how it works, well, you can't pick who gets lucky and who doesn't, and expecting them all to spend hundreds of thousands of yen on something on bad odds of happening? (And they're not good, due to the aforementioned DL live bug)
Most of them will quit, because most of them (and us) don't have an expectation of winning the lottery.