Contest of Champions update

I haven't made a Contest of Champions update in quite some time, but I am still playing it.  I've finally reached one of my main goals; having all of my 2-star teams (five teams of three champions in all) maxed out so I can play the 3x3s without worrying about losing any of my match-ups; or even, only very rarely, even one of the best two of three fights in the match-up period.  I'm also working on a spare character, who's due to be maxed out within a few days.  The old adage that once you have something you don't value it and look forward to something else seems to be true, however.  In this case, there are two developments that have impacted that:

1. It used to be that you could get the 3-star hero without too much trouble by earning the 90,000 milestone.  Now, the next milestone, 160,000 has consistently been insufficient.  Because this is based on your placement as a percentage within the population of people who played, I assume that the user base has increased significantly.  Getting more than 160,000 requires sitting around devoting more time to the challenge than I have available (getting even that high is tricky for me), so my initial goal of maxing these guys out so I could get a cool character when it was available seems to have been taken from me.
2. I'm not really interested in getting more 3-star champions.  I've moved to the point in quests where I really need to graduate to ranked up 4-star champions now.  Since getting 4-star champions in versus is even harder than getting 3-star champions (and you can't do it at all with 2-star champions anyway) I have to do something else.

Now, this doesn't mean that it isn't nice to have all these maxed out lower level champions.  I still need to play versus with some regularity in order to get premium hero crystal shards and versus chips, which I can turn into gold and units.  But it's a much more relaxed environment, where I just play until I hit a milestone or two and then move on.

A few other developments:

1. Getting 4-star champions is hard, actually.  I need to graduate to Heroic difficulty event quests in order to get crystal shards to do it, but it'll be slow, and I'll probably end up with (at least for quite a while) a bunch of characters that I'm not really interested in; but I can't ditch 'em, because they're the only 4-stars I have.  Right now, I have Drax, Venom, Scarlet Witch and Thor girl as 4-stars.  As I get more, I may start ditching my existing 3-stars slowly.  I've already got six complete 3-man teams of 3- and 4-star heroes for that versus.  But maybe not.  If I ever want to have a chance at getting 4-star heroes through versus, I probably need a lot of teams to pull it off.
2. Ranking up 4-stars is really hard.  You can get to (and therefore through) three ranks without too much trouble, but after that you need catalysts that are almost impossible to get.  My Drax has been waiting to rank up to 4th rank for months.  Without that, he's only a little better than a maxed out 3-star hero.  He is a little better... but only a little.  Not much more than 500 points.  Of course, Drax might not be the champion with the most potential either, but he's what I've got.
3. In the meantime, I've started slowly working towards maxing out the rest of my 3-stars.  As with my 2-stars, by the time I'm done, I probably won't care nearly as much, because I'll be more focused on getting and advancing 4-stars.  But hey—you gotta do something, right?  Plus, I think some of them may pass up in score my current maxed out 3-stars, while I'm waiting on 4-stars of that class, so I'll probably marginally improve my position by doing so anyway.