Sometimes I don’t feel like getting food of a specific type (esp plants, sometimes insects) so I let my plant/insect dragons starve until it’s either downtime or breeding time. 

Not to mention, it’s a great opportunity to get back into the game for all the people who neglected their clan. 

Now if they only told us why the site went down, I’d be totally fine with random downtimes as long as the site’s speedy afterwards.