Anyone who expected to pay just 3,495 presents for a wondrous residence and not have to pay a considerable amount of presents and grout to fully upgrade has either never played an event in the past 3 years or is being wilfully and obtusely naive.
It was very easy to get presents this event and until now the game was awash with grout. Something had to be done to restore the value of the resource before it became as worthless as everything else. You can't have a game where one resource, oil, is priceless and everything else is totally worthless. If you ran out of presents you can still upgrade the wondrous winter residence to a very useful building with 350 population and then either wait until next year or pay gems to get to L8. I honestly don't believe that anyone bought all three buildings so late in the event that they didn't get a chance to upgrade any of them. If you are short of grout to get to L12, just be patient - there were plenty of ways to get it during the event, most especially in the PH
So BB made a mistake in a description. It doesn't mean anyone is entitled to extravagant compensation. You're not supposed to be able to buy EVERYTHING in EVERY event.
In short, this is a very tedious and whiny thread. Some people need to get some perspective.