I felt for this first Chapter, I got the shadow monsters more frequently. Plus I believe the magic cost to purchase the required tokens went up in "price".
It also seems that the "lovely interns" are purposely designing things for people needing to use time skips or gems. Not to mention conflicting explorations with the regular tower challenge characters.
I finally was able to finish up the BBW and stow him, Red and the 3 pigs away. The next pain is Gonzo. Since you can't purchase tokens, it is taking forever for me to get his Ear Hat tokens. I have already leveled to 10 newer characters since the Muppet event.