Agree. Getting one or no Paws when the Ticket is started vs getting five has zero to do with luck. IT it totally raw talent.
All of my boards had at least one Paw at the start. Very few had more. Some never had more than that first one. Some had one or more show up after the first one. Some were relatively easy to get, some took a little work, some were just unattainable. My guess is that this is what everybody who played regularly really saw. I had no boards start with zero Paws, and barring a screenshot (which we repeatedly asked for from those claiming it) I don't believe anyone else had one start with zero Paws.
Unlike most events, in this one it wasn't really a choice between the daily prizes and the main one. Winning dailies was a frequent byproduct of working to get Paws down. Much more so than in any other event I've seen. Usually you have to concentrate on getting the daily you want when it comes up at the expense of progressing on the main prize. Not so here.
My take on both this mini-game and the one in the St Patrick's Day event the last two years is that many players balk at having to do more than click the "right" animal/athlete/whatever. It's really a matter of just figuring out these mini-games and finding the correct playing strategy to achieve what you want. Same with the Archaeology event. Haste makes waste in thinking games. Unfortunately, players seem to have been conditioned to checking an unnamed site to do the thinking/work for them, and in games like these you have to do the work yourself. Sorry that many of you are not used to using your brains, but blaming bad luck in a thinking game is the lazy player's way out.