I wonder if MiHo is even care about F2P. They're in black already, new banners make enough money to support servers and make millions of dollars. Support for GI is really anemic and by the time 2.0 drops MiHo risks to lose most of the playerbase. The real question is if they care and will try to do something or will just say "Thanks for your money, now we are milking whales. Please do not disturb us with your F2P complains".
I never played their games for long, so i can't really comment or predict their long time strategy.
I've been playing Honkai for over a year now and it's got way more stuff going on in every big patch. They definitely like to keep the stamina income VERY low though. In this game it's Resin, in Honkai it's Stamina. There's a very tight fixed amount of regen that you get and once that's over, you pretty much wait. They also calculate the weekly stamina income/spending and pretty much leave you neutral, so you can't really stockpile it if you're doing all the various modes. One thing I'll say about Honkai though, they constantly barrage you with events of different types and even completely different gameplay. Even at the end of the patches when things are winding down, there's still 2-3 simultaneous events and enough content to always feel like you have stuff to do. In fact, I'd argue that most days there may be a little too much stuff to do, to the point that I don't feel like doing it.
My biggest complaint with Honkai is that everything is laid bare as "this is the best, pay us if you want it". There's no real experimentation with weapons/team comps/stigmata (think artifacts). There's a set that they make for each new character that's just flat out the best, and it's always in a gacha. You can make lesser sets for free with grind though, so unless you need to show your e-peen, you can get by. Also, unlike Genshin, they have competitive scoring modes, so there's a driving force to get the best times/scores in various modes throughout the week.
Playing both, I'm especially surprised with how bare the content is in Genshin. I honestly expected it to be even more packed/interesting than Honkai considering the profits and playerbase size. Like I said previously though, we're still probably a good 6-8 months behind in content lag though, so this stuff we're getting was likely developed when they were trying to release and fine tune the base game. I'm willing to give them time to get their shit together, but it sure doesn't help things right now. I am a little optimistic that the developer leaks basically stated that they're not going to tie progression to Resin from Inazuma onwards, so let's hope that's actually true.
