A suggestion for next year's Artisan Festival: Add an option to the context menu of the elf which when clicked on will say the number of points needed until the next stage of the holiday tree and how much time is left on the current tree before the festival moves to the next town.
Maybe they might like to take into account that although we all want to help with the tree, we don't all have huge amounts of BODs or enjoy doing BODs. Even people with a crafter character don't all collect BODs, personally I just wouldn't have anywhere to store them. Some people don't even have a crafter so they have no way of helping out.
Your ideas simply help those that can't be bothered to assist with the festival, but want to reap the rewards. Adding these ideas simply helps those people, they can recall (gate on Siege) into town and know exactly when and where they can collect their "rewards", people should have to work for this. They shouldn't "know" when things are good or when they can go get their free stuff. Keep dropping bods until you get results, not "click a button and see how many more someone else has to do before YOU get your reward".
Things that would help:
Let it be known now, that there will/won't be a festival in 2019.
And consider, seriously, on the shards not named Atlantic, dropping the points needed for final stage (star) by about 30%.
Seems there have been fewer and fewer participants each year, don't break the back of the ones still involved.
They need to just shift it to a point system like the current bods. Turn in a bods get points, redeem those points for Holiday rewards of your choice. With a reward if you contributed X amount of points to a tree before it became fully grown. Maybe .1% (25 Points). you know, More than a single iron bod.
It's a nice thought about the community banding together to bring up the trees, but not really realistic for most of the servers. I think it was 120 Large val hammer bods per tree, x 20 servers that's 2,400 Val Hammers worth of bods to complete a single tree on every server. x however many towns. Sounds reasonable.