@Marlowe: This is the nature of these kind of games. Due to the economics of it, they are lead to have better characters and that needs worse characters to exist to dilute the good ones. I would love to have this game without these random elements and everyone gets a full roster of the top units, a fair and even playing field. But this economic model exists because other people spend money to "Pay 2 win" (and in this case they get more feathers so they also have more 5*s to merge and continue to win etc.). If you go a few pages back in the thread you will see me complain a lot about it.
This is all just my opinion anyway, my enjoyment would be very hindered by not having top units. Others here maybe don't care so much?
In Normal you can do basically everything because if worse comes to worse you can just overlevel your guys a bit. When you get to the last chapters of Lunatic story, you won't be able to clear those without some serious firepower of your own, and you won't reliably get good scores in the Arena either.
Better luck next time, I suppose.
