Why is "It's something to do" apparently a valid defense?

[Alahra]

Eithercase, it's definitely not the case now since people are straight up getting alt weapons from law tomestones or even primal tokens.

Right, it's not the case now, and part of the reason it *is* that way is because of some of the initial dissatisfaction with how the Relic quest was set up originally.

This is more on itemization for the item drops rather than an issue with relic specifically (at the very least, it's a far stretch to blame the relic as the source of the problem, versus the raid giving lower leveled rewards).

The relic *itself* wasn't the problem, no, but one of the ways the developers chose to address the problem, in addition to the increased item level for the weapons themselves, was to make future non-raid weapon options either have a significant time investment (future Relic stages), require at least some Raiding (Unidentified/Encrypted Tomestones for Tomestone weapons), or other content with raid-like difficulty (the original, non-echo EX primals).

The point in general though was that there was a lot of dissatisfaction with the original Relic implementation, coming from a lot of different directions. Some players didn't like the difficulty of the fights (well, Titan). Others felt the reward given for the time investment was too great, and still others wanted Relics to be a sign of dedication and/or to last for a significant amount of time. All of that feedback played into the design of the resulting Zodiac Weapon Saga.

The fact that it even exists at all was because of player feedback, as the developers originally didn't have any plans for the Relics to grow in power. So it's not so simple as the developers getting rid of the things players liked: the questline as a whole was in fact an attempt to address a number of things the players weren't satisfied with. It has, by and large, actually satisfied its original goals, for what it's worth, even if the forums explode with complaints each time a new step is released.