I don’t really see an issue with it.
I have burned up pretty much all my reserves (49 relics, 13 of them R7, and shard farming second GL), but once that well runs dry, while it will certainly be an inconvenience - I don’t think it is ‘wrong’ that we actually have to farm materials for salvage to gain the parts needed.
The stat boosts from R0 to R7 are worth at least a full Gear Level (or very close to it) in most cases. I personally would way rather have to farm 1 g12+ piece for zinbiddle cards, a few mk3 holoprojectors and a few days worth of low level junk than try to build another 6 pieces of g12 stuff (including a finisher!), and actually going from g13 to g14 would probably be even worse than that (if it ever happens) for each character.
We all got a nice head start on our relic collection by being able to use up the gear that we complained for years that we’d love to be able to trade - at least they actually did give us that.
Now it is time to dance to the CG tune again and grind, grind, grind (or pay, pay, pay, if that is more your style...) away at gear.
(Shrugs)
Nothing new there...