The change today was laughable. I don't think crafters cared about how many items they had to craft to get red scrip tokens. They care that they can:
1. Only craft 9 subcomponents per week...
2. .... assuming that gatherers are willing to spend their red tokens on favors.

Have them spend red tokens on unlocking the capability to get ooids. Then put the ooids on some rare node, hidden, whatever. But don't make them expend red tokens to obtain them every time.