CG are just hoping that people don't realise that datacrons aren't worth it. By "it" I mean anything.
I stopped the 150 crystal per day farming of datacrons during conquest about 3 months ago now. I realised that was costing me 2100 crystals per conquest, and it was not earning me back that amount of crystals from anywhere.
I sit in K2, and I worked out that I'd be better off for crystals if I stopped cron farming and that made me drop to k3. But guess what? I have not dropped out of k2, so it's all good for me.
The other benefit is that I no longer experience "hell week" where you need to: 1. Purchase 3x50 lots of energy every day. 2. Manually play all of that energy to get through conquest asap to 3. Get to farming cron mats. Instead I just play through conquest over the two weeks. I think I spent 200 crystals last time, because I actually wanted to play a bit more! Wanted to play! How many people say that during hell week?
Anyways, I'm saving about 2k crystals every month, and haven't had a drop in GAC crystal income.
I still have crons to set, because I buy the focussed ones in the shipments. I have to use that currency on something. So what mats I do get from dusting and leftover energy when I'm done with conquest just upgrade those a bit.