Its not that hard to grind out 1000 shards, it takes a retainer 16 ventures, thats all. Getting crystals is even easier, with an ephemeral node can give you up to 200-300. I have got, without huge effort, 9k fire and earth crystals. The same nodes can also give clusters at a slightly slower rate.
So we dont need bots to get our shards/crystals/clusters.