I'm a collector. My ultimate goal is to collect every single family that's in the game. I currently have 71 completed families, and I still have 131 to go. That doesn't sound like too much, except that those 71 were the easy ones. I just did a bit of math, and I discovered that, to complete all these families at their (current) regular prices (so ignoring any price discounts) I will need 3.994.800.000 coins and 37.669 acorns... and that's excluding the first animal of the limited families that have to be bought with special holiday tokens (or won in community events). Also, that's excluding all the land expansions, and excluding any decorations or fun buildings. So that's a LOT to collect.
If I can make 10 million coins a day, I'd still need 400 days for all the coin-based families. And with an average of 10 acorns a day, I would need 3767 days (more than 10 years) for all the acorn-based families. And if the game is still up by then, I'm sure that Gameloft will have added many new animal families in that timeframe.
Yeah, I know, 10 acorns a day is a bit pessimistic, but it seems that, the higher level you get, the lower your chances of winning anything worthwhile in Kung Fu Scrat or Sid's Egg Rescue. So the only way to really make a difference, would be to purchase acorns. If I simplify things a bit and count 30% discount for ALL animals at the Platinum VIP level, then at regular prices (2100 acorns for £80), I would need to buy 13 of those packs to get to 26.368 (=70% of 37.669), costing me 13 * £80 = £1040. That's definitely not going to happen. Even if I purchase the acorns during one of those 'three times the acorns for the price' discounts, it would still cost me £347. That's a lot less, but still a huge investment for any game, and if I see how many bugs this game has, and how incredibly slow Gameloft is in fixing them (just think about all the bugs related to friends that so many players are suffering from, or all the people who lose (parts of) their village all of a sudden), then I'm even more hesitant to spend any real money on this game.
In short (or for the tldr folks among you who jumped to the end straight away): as a collector, I have come to the conclusion that this game is a no-can-do. At lower levels it's a lot of fun, but the higher I get, the more it turns into an incredibly big grind. So while I'm still enjoying myself atm, I'm not sure how long I will stick around. I'd be curious to hear how other people look at all this. How do YOU approach this huge mountain?