The determining amount for a given piece of gear could potentially scale to the underlying drop rate value to better scale with each HTMB. The Avatar fights for instance have a pretty good drop rate on most of the items, and it would have a 500 point requirement be rather steep in order to obtain one of the pieces through this method. That being said, let's say that Shinryu's cloak or dagger is as ultra rare (0.1%), then it would make more sense to have the points required be 1000 instead of 500 to obtain one of those pieces of equipment. The drop rates are no longer a mystery to us, but rather the time/effort put into obtaining these drops being a known quantity versus an unknown one is the concern nowadays.

In the early days of Vana'diel, you could go a year without getting the drop you wanted and it's just a part of the game. With the introduction of spammable HTMB and other instance based content, you are no longer introducing other elements into obtaining gear such as claiming or popping an NM. The only two elements are getting the merits to do the fight and then winning the fight. The cost is time and effort and with how SE has been steering the game, they are trying to be a lot more accommodating to people's time and effort put into the game. I don't think it's unreasonable to have a clear path towards getting the gear you want if you have done the fight enough times where you 'should' have gotten the gear already, but RNG has not been in your favor.

If you want that last piece of lilith gear, you know that you could get it as a drop one day or you could ensure that you finally get it after your 500th successful VE run. I also know so many people who don't want to do certain fights together because of the fact that they would fight for drops. If you can have a clearing group focused on clearing the harder difficulties with the intention of getting the points and not fight over the gear, it would promote groups to work together more to enjoy and clear the content instead of spamming a single fight on VE over and over because that's the only difficulty they can achieve solo and don't want to have to compete over drops.