Honestly, just using the event to stockpile candy with no intentions other than powering up.
That said, did have my best raid run ever. For context, I've done 146 total successful raids, and a lot of those came from the various legendary bird days we had.
But today I was in a neighboring town to deposit some cash at my credit union and drove by the lake downtown where good spawns occur. Well, saw some raids. I was able to chain a sharpedo, machamp, scyther, and cresselia due to the sheer number of people randomly driving to the same raids. We had 20 people for cresselia!
The best part is that I frequently end up on the low end of rare candy rewards (even when my girlfriend and I occasionally duo a raid I seem to come up empty while she always gets 1 or 2), I pulled in 20 candies.
Then I finally hatched a gen 4 starter and it was piplup, which is super rare here (haven't seen one since the initial rollout).
That assuages some of my recent frustrations with the game.