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My take on it is that Rovio is trying to find additional ways to monetize the game.
For the people who are impatient to wait for enough missions to complete to collect the special materials, the cost to upgrade using gems instead of special materials is just low enough now to seriously consider doing (even I’ve thought about plunking down a few $$$ for some gems, and I’m a cheap-o [email protected]!).
In particular the “Super Rareium” is extremely hard to get, and you need one of those to upgrade a TF from L10 to L11 and I’m willing to bet that you’ll need even more at higher levels! So there’s another place you can spend gems on.
You’ll also notice that the cost to “Instant Upgrade” using gems has dropped dramatically. For example it used to cost 3,000 gems instantly take High Octane Bumblebee from L9 to L10, whereas now it only costs 1,000 gems. Similarly, using the same example, if you used coins and mats to start the upgrade, you can then spend 100 gems to instantly finish it, whereas before the v1.5.15 update it would cost something like 500 gems to do that.
These are just a few examples off the top of my head, but there are lots of other ways to spend gems.
So basically Rovio now is making it easier for players to convince themselves to spend gems because it costs fewer of them to do stuff and there are lots more ways to spend them, so more players might actually pay cash to buy a bucket of them or whatever.