I've bought all credit pieces everyday for approximately 3.5 years, when I figured out they were worth it. I still have maybe 1.5k of several of the pieces. What I'm saying is, these are going to run out in short order. At which point I'll have to farm them and for an end game player that is a massive leap backward for no reason. It's just poor/lazy design to make pieces which have been redundant for years into a new bottleneck. I'm totally ok with r5-7 being a bottleneck cus that's high end gear I need to convert and I can work on that by doing better in activities such as the raids etc.. but running out of r1-4 materials (carbonite) just means I have to farm them.
I'm not out to convince you personally man cus frankly I think you've drank a bit too much of the koolaid. If you think farming white gear components with your energy is the way forward, then this conversation is redundant.