Conquest reward drops

If you can’t see the images, basically if you need gear for your characters, getting the mid tier crate is best because later on in the rewards they cut the gear drop in half, the crates don’t even have a higher drop amount in them later on.
So in some of the other activities it made sense when we’d lose a “weaker” 2 crates for a stronger one even though its less but saves time farming the hard stuff out. But this! We missed out on 1-2 Conquests for this junk? We’re literally losing ALL gear drops simply for shards and relic pieces. I know those who are already unlocking the latest Legends and Conquest characters/ships probably can clear most of Conquest and don’t need that much lower gear, but some of us struggled and fine tuned our teams to get into Hard Mode and catch up so there isn’t such a wide gap and make some solid contributions to our guilds. Who in their right minds thought reducing the gear drop by so much would be a good idea? From the needless delay(you could have just rehashed another conquest while we waited) to the botched launch with barely much compensation, to this grindfest of gear because we need to get so nonsensical requirements geared up and reliced to 7 or 8.