Sacred Grove questions

I cannot wrap my head over new Sacred Grove mechanics, since it was introduced. Am I missing something here, or it's really so bad as I see it? I studied wiki, and it added nothing new to my knowledge, but maybe wiki isn't exhaustive enough?

What I know (or think that I know):

- Sacred grove encounter gives about 200 units per vegetable patch. Only "blue" monsters gives units, and they happens like 50% of time, so half of patches are totally useless, and for default 4 choices I can get, in average, 2-3 such monsters available (so 400-600 units in total, mostly in different colors, so, say, 300 single-color units in average).
- Most hortirafting options are blind gamble, similar to essense ones, only worse. It also consumes about 100-200 units each, even for the "cheap" choices, and some unreal sums like 5000 for more or less predicable ones.

So as I see it, I can conclude that it's marginally useful for changes that influence non-equipment items like maps, fragments, etc. (It's quite useless for equipment, as essense encounters gives more predicable and more abundant choices here). And for anything really useful and predicable I need to gather lifeforce in course of 20-30 grove encounters, and it will be only _one_ use anyway. I.e., if not tune and farm specifically for the grove, it's mostly inaccessible, as in casual run of league I hardly meet 15-20 grove encounters in total.

Am I missing something here? Maybe there are relatively easy ways to influence encounters and their outcome? I know about Atlas tree, of course, but it looks too much dedication for me. All other Atlas extra content gives more with much less efforts.

I've farmed harvest before the changes and made alot of currency via TFT.
The current harvest feels like a shadow of it's former self. The only recipies I have used this season are the resistance changes (cold to fire, etc).
For some special crafting you can still make use of the craftings with a tag (e.g. guranteeing additional curse on hunter chests with reforge caster). But all this has become DAMN grindy.

Basically what GGG has been doing lately is give us an atlas tree for all mechanics with tons of nodes on it. Then they nerfed all the mechanics to the ground, and put some of the stuff that they removed/nerfed back into those nodes so that you get roughly the same output from the mechanic you used to when you fully invest in it on the atlas, sometimes you'll get less even with full investment like breach which is honestly just a joke at this point. If you don't invest into a mechanic you might as well ignore it because you'll just waste your time for nothing.

In case of harvest your observations are mostly correct. You get 4 patches per encounter half of which usually don't have blue crops and only blue crops drop life force maybe a 100 per patch. You can boost those numbers somewhat by investing in the tree but the principle remains.

As for the crafts themselves, as far as i know the main usage of harvest now adays is divination card gambling for headhunter/magebloods. There are also res and fragment swaps that can be useful. The target chaos/exalts only give one modifier now and are more or less useless outside of specific cases related to meta crafting where you can use it to force a specific mod. Outside of that it's basically just wasting life force.