Botting in SE games rarely ever goes punished, just because of the fact that it's more of a hassle than necessary. Bad behavior, outside of RL violations such as threats, is often swept under the rug in these games. Win-trading, for example, is practically encouraged here in XIV. Short of it breaking the game in someway (like the old marketboard one), hacks are also not a big concern of theirs and will often go unpunished, despite any feeble attempts to report it. Maybe the GM/STF are just being lazy due to how tedious and (often) impossible it is to track bots/hack attempts on what's likely a system that was not designed to do so... maybe they're being told to not really bother... who knows. Either way, people can and will almost always get away with cheating in SE titles, just because of how they poorly deal with in-game problems.
That's actually where the devs would have to change things up, similar to how they did for crystals and clusters. RMT have long been the suppliers of very cheap shards across every single server (though not as rampant now, as it was before). As a result of that, the devs never really bothered to change how you obtain them since it is impossible to be rid of RMT presence in a game like this. It's kind of ridiculous that, given how necessary shards are/were for housing stuff, there's no efficient way to obtain them in a timely manner that can be considered worthwhile for their use.
Remember though that shards are used at ~10x the rate of crystals and clusters per synth. While that 1000 shards might sound like a lot, the length that it'll take you ends much shorter than the others tiers.
