Epic side quest too difficult? You don't need to do it to reach one million
So it seems if you really, really don't like the difficulty in the Epic side quest, you don't actually have to do it. Here's how you can get one million acorns without doing it at all. This makes some reasonable, but probably safe assumptions about how the side quests work.
I did a full run of Master twice, and both times got the same amount of acorns: 12161. That is a full completion up to the boss. The first seven fights are 608 acorns and the last three are 1216, 1824, and 4865. This is much less than Epic, but Master only requires three baskets. This means if we get 28x4=112 baskets for the month we can do 37 runs of Master. 37 runs of Master is 12161 x 37 = 449957.
The objectives contain 200k of acorns, and that includes 5k for that 2* level up objective some people are annoyed with. Let's say you deliberately don't do that either. That 195k. You can get 50k for logging in daily from the calendar: 12.5k per week. Full explore of Uncollected gets you 200k, and full explore of Master gets you 100k.
200k + 100k + 50k + 195k = 545k. 545k + 449957 = 994,957.
You are now 5047 acorns away from one million. You can get those by doing a chapter or two of lower difficulties, or maybe you'll get them from some future acorn source that is supposed to be coming later (all current sources in the game add up to 1.75 million, so there are other sources coming to reach Kabam Miike's two million acorns).
If you do Epic 28 times, you need to average 16250 acorns per run, which is between five and six fights completed. If you can consistently average six fights per entry in Epic or more, that works. If you can't, fully completing Master also works, but you'll need to do more than one run per day some times.
But you can in fact avoid Epic difficulty if Epic difficulty is not to your liking. It is very tight, but it seems to work out. If you're willing to do the 2* level up, this strategy puts you within 43 acorns of one million, a trivial amount to get from lower difficulties, and you might just get that basically for free from a future source.
If you've already done one Epic entry and got completely wrecked without reaching fight six, you can switch to this strategy now and fill in the gap with some effort in the lower difficulty monthly quests. But the longer you strike out in Epic and burn up those baskets, the harder it will be to make up the difference with this strategy. This assumes we're free to do Master 37 times, and I think we are.