Well, some kind of crunch. I'm at the point of the game where I don't need a single Kyro for anyone until the next marquee drops. This is recent (just this past week, in fact) but it's been almost a year since I was really behind on Kyros. All the ones I've spent since have been either brand new toons or putting a g12 finisher on an old, bad toon that I could happily live without, but I'm taking everyone to relics just for fun.
At my level, the crunch isn't gear, exactly. It's signal data. The good news is that other than buying some crystals when I first started the game, I've been free to play and still managed to slowly make up the backlog of Kyros. Not only is it possible to do now -- though difficult -- but at some point they'll loosen the Kyro crunch to focus more on relics as the big bottleneck. At that point Kyros will become more like Mk3 Carbantis are today: annoying for a while, but it's always easy to see how eventually a player will be able to overcome the crunch.