Bot shards are much less common now than they were a few weeks ago.

Shards are also trivial to gather. Even getting 594 fire and water shards to make say 99 buttons in a blanket is only going to take you an hour and a half or so. I have charted my shard gathering times. It takes me about 7 minutes to get 100 shards. If you're using them yourself and you're the sole supplier, an hour and a half is not excessive considering how many hours 99 foods will last you even if you're wiping a lot. How can you really say "You can't even have the GP to efficiently make a loop like I do." All you want is 300GP for your ward. Having more GP doesn't change your GP gain rate. You'll still get 5 GP back per swing, 5GP back per tick. You'll still be able to only do 1 ward every 300 GP.

There are issues with culinary, but I'd say the viability of two-star recipes is a bigger thing than the shard cost of popular recipes.