Agreed with this, always have. In a game like this, any single piece of gear that takes longer than a month or so to obtain is way too excessive. Everything has a painfully short shelf life as it is and this just exacerbates the problem.

There is nothing dumb about it. Otherwise it would have been changed years ago.
Many dumb ideas/practices that started "years ago" are still around despite also having had the chance to change. This doesn't necessarily exclude them from being dumb.