Even if you get doctor status, a rune item isn't guaranteed
Although, if you do the bronzite + cluster trade x3 to the Curator Moogle (knocking out THAT objective), you end up with...
three colored chips in your inventory, that you can use to trade to the strange apparatus. Greatly increasing your odds, since you just need 1/3 of your chips to be a winner and give a rune weapon. Then if you really need more tries, get more chips? They're still available from NPCs too (21k gil each), or the Curator Moogle again for slightly more with the bronzite trade if the store is closed for the day and you JUST CAN'T WAIT.
Phoenix.Madotsuki said:
»Normally I agree pretty often with your thoughts Capuchin but I will chime that I feel 5 turn ins of egg sets is a bit excessive. I think 3 would've been a more reasonable middle ground while still encouraging people to engage with the seasonal event, but that one is just my opinion!
3 instead of 5 does sounds reasonable, but I'm not THAT bothered by 5. It's a 10 day span to do five trades for the event, which is no massive time investment.
I'm not sure people realize how low the bar is for completion. Grab three letter eggs to make the first three letters of your name, or there are other fairly easy combinations like "F E S", "I C E", "A I R"... Trade those to moogle. That's it.
You can get more random eggs every new game day by talking to the moogle, and if in a party with another player you guarantee one egg of their first initial. Can get extra eggs by trading items, like 3 per hour from trading a stack of Sairui-ran (5k/stack from curio moogle). LightningHelix noted this
above, it's really not much work.
After the (not very massive) struggle of getting the first three letters of your name, can just afk at the moogle NPC and wait for a new game day to get more eggs every hour. It's practically zero effort. And there are players with eggs in bazaars near the NPCs in the three cities. And as more people engage with the event due to vanabout, likely more eggs and letters available in bazaars too (an actual positive to having everyone crowding into one easy event or high population servers, as opposed to a negative from a lot of people competing for a resource).
P.S., don't be a jerk, if you have eggs you don't need and you're AFK at the NPCs, put em up in bazaar! Everyone wins, people get their letters faster.
...you still have to spent like 10 combined hours collecting eggs though.
To be more precise, you have to spend like 10 seconds per real life hour to get another 5 random eggs per character. Don't make it sound like it's 10 hours of actual work, just afk by the moogle when you're doing something else and occasionally look up to talk to NPCs. Or set your HP there and just get in the habit of quickly talking to the moogle for more eggs when you happen to drop by. It's not something you have to do in a day, you have the entire Vana'bout period. Hardly an epic ordeal.