Idle Planet Miner + Tapjoy = meta quests?

On Idle Planet Miner, I am up to telescope 9, planet 28, finally getting some palladium and my first rhodium.  It has been a long haul.  I never paid much attention to the TAPJOY option on the Boosts tab, since most of those cross-promotions looked like games I would have no interest in playing: Candy Crush, bingo games, slots, overblown battle games, overblown King of Everything games.  But a few were either familiar or seemed harmless, so I tried it out.

I played Idle Heroes off and on about 3-5 years ago on a different device, so I wondered if installing it on this tablet would count as "the first time you have installed it".  Yes.  And I didn't mind that the bonus tasks were all VIP levels that involve a few $ of real money, since I know that game was a fun one, and I needed a bunch of dusts and summons to get a team up to speed.  So, VIP1, 2 and 3 got me 3,550 dark matter back in Idle Planet Miner.  It did detect the activity, did give out the reward as promised, and wow, what you can do with 3000+ dark matter in that game.  Every time I check on the status, I can do a production boost to watch the progress bars go at a reasonable speed.

Since I'm always looking for new word games, I took a crack at Word Crush for some more dark matter.  It's a peaceful game with a neat combination of word search and a pattern where letters drop to fill spaces, and each level has its own specific theme giving the sets of words to find.  It has been pretty trivial so far, as far as puzzles go, but Anne and I had fun poking at it, and by level 50, it had sent 298 dark matter over to IPM.

I was less thrilled with Mergical, which is too cutesy and redundant, just the 20th Merge Magic clone I've looked at.  And Merge Magic was probably the 20th clone of some other thing.  But there's something satisfyingly warped about powering my little space mining game by dragging goofy little elf people and dolls and flowers around in some other dimension.

Also not thrilled with Trading Legend, although it is a gorgeous piece of work where every screen looks like a classical Chinese silk painting.  There is a huge variety of things to do: a village full of businesses, retainers, trading levels, buildings, skills, items ... but it plays like it's stuck in tutorial mode, just an endless stream of little popups saying what I should be doing next.  Which would be bad enough, but it made me accidentally have a baby with the first lady I met, and now that I'm trying to spam click bonuses to get the creature to grow up (so I can get back to more interesting tasks), it suggests I go throw gifts at other "beauties".  And it's such a slow progression, I don't think I'll ever get to level 7 to get this first bonus sent back to IPM.  I will probably delete this one and try something smaller -- I can only imagine how much memory this thing eats up.

These cross-game rewards add a neat kind of meta level to the original game.  You can continue in IPM, but then get resources to burn in IPM by goofing off in some other game for a while.  Sure, being able to hit Cash Windfall 10 times in a row to get $50B is kinda cheaty, but like every other game, if it hands you a system, you use all the tools in that system to beating the game levels.