Sounds like I wasn't the only one with leftover apples, cinnamon, and caramel. Either there weren't enough things to make with them, or there weren't enough *good* things to make with them.
It's probably the second thing, seems to me the recipes that had a lot of really good prizes sucked down that chocolate. I managed to spend most of my leftover ingredients, and cleared them all out in a few cities, but some others had leftovers. So the multiple event currency didn't work as badly as it could have, but some people got unlucky. I think maybe having only three different items instead of five in the future would balance things well.
Ingredients in incidents was a pretty good touch, like I stated earlier, they seemed to pop up in the common ones and ingredients are far more useful to me than a tiny amount of coins and supplies.
The big prize of 15 ingredients at the end when there was nothing but Renos, 1 ups and Store buildings was kind of a let down, since those items aren't too hard to get these days with DCs and the GE. The mill was easier to get maxed out than the other buildings offered this year though, since the three questline upgrades were acquired somewhere around the midpoint and the other three weren't too hard to get with baking recipes.
Some of the players in my guild felt the production requirements were a bit overdone though, and there were quite a bit of them. Combined with the DCs, the productions felt a bit hectic at times. While it was a good event, it felt a bit like there was too much packed into the event at once -- two parallel questlines, the Mill and its upgrades,another upgrade level for the Cider Mill, the fragments, and the Rogue Hideout shrink.