I'm perfectly fine with collectibles that you can only earn by participating events. These have at least a clear purpose: to show you have deserved them in first place.
However, the ones that you can buy and have no other purpose other than sitting in my left sidebar are redundant, even if they serve as reward for earning bells in first place. The add-ons however are actually slightly more useful than collectibles, for example extending your seemingly limited amount private messages up to 1700! But then again, add-ons aren't essential for any TBTer to have.
I just wish that TBT could offer better incentives to spend my thousands of bells that I've accumulated since a few years without relying on its users, such as exclusive physical prizes. That might seem to be a daunting proposition for a mildly popular forum, since that would mean spending a significant amount of real money. The bell system might as well not even exist at all if they can't manage to make spending any more useful than it currently is, since it often encourages certain users to posts shallow one-liners and/or stating their opinion without arguments that supports it, or even the ridiculous concept of villager trafficking in New Leaf. I just don't see why some people would die for trying to get the hard-to-obtain pricey collectibles that are inherently useless in practice.
