This was the first summer anniv I skipped but I remember last year most of my runs consisted of forest runs as either not enough people would join my desert runs or CCA in public games. From the chatter it doesn't seem like I missed much. Before HBR incentivized everyone to run the different MAE maps and people would join together and grind to eventually form a max HBR 4player squad. The formula was kind of ruined with the removal of HBR. Removing HBR was a nerf to the event drop rates but also discouraged players from running different maps in hopes that they reach max HBR. So to offset the removal of HBR everyone grinded forest as it took the least amount of playing time to find the best quality of weps (fs/dob/milla).
I will say I did like the length of the MAE quests, it was a nice efficient way to grind for a particular item. A lot of the newer quests made the past few years are a lot of fun but they do generally take a lot more time. While fun, they generally aren't as efficient to hunt for particular items compared to older quests. I hope staff can produce something that is high quality for next years event. I do miss HBR, I don't know why that was removed, I guess to make this server more casual friendly?