Yeah, the rewards were rather bad pretty much all season (for me, at least).
I didn't notice the season was hard until the end. I just played out of inertia the rest of the season, I guess.
There are reasons why it was harder, one of them being that it followed a super-long one and it was a super-short one. And that messes things up.
As for services for auto-renting, I'm using splex.gg, and it has really good results. It kinda burns through your RCs at a balanced usage (there are different modes to use it, including aggressive and low RCs) if you have many cards under their management, so you need to delegate enough HP to the accounts (more than they recommend). I use multiple accounts to rent out from. A way to split cards by different criteria. The "issue" with that is you have to manually centralize DEC from these accounts. And this can become a chore in itself.
I tried to rent out a bunch of cards manually this morning. Just a headache....I guess I need to figure out a system for account management, and send cards to that for rentals.