I came back to the game last year around Oct and played through all of the Core, HoT and PoF content and stories without the need for a skyscale. Bunny and Raptor made life a whole lot easier and I was content with them. When the LWS stuff went on sale around Feb or March this year, I decided it was time and took me about a month or two of casual play collecting and crafting everything on my own. It didn't get boring because I never made it boring. There is plenty of content going on I run in parallel. So to me, it wasn't ludicrous at all considering there are way longer collections/grinds than Skyscale in the game.