You are acting like the people that still populate exploratory content don’t find the current systems fun as they are and that the answer to all the problems is “just make it fun”. To some people intrinsic enjoyment can come out of grinds, just as other people are fine to pay to skip grinds for convenience, this is how MMO’s have worked as long as we have had central trading systems (like the grand exchange)

Building systems around allowing for either grinding if you want it or being able to skip with money (which reminder very few fragments are actually expensive) benefits both groups. I’m fine to delete the flat DPS buffs that the content is tuned around (like aetherweaver) but making everything either passive or “get it once and you have it forever” negatively affects the way people cycle through field content because it pushes people onto a defined path

This is not to say that just killing mobs should be the only way to achieve this. I’m fully supportive of a system of repeatable quests on different classes to say “revive an abandoned town” that also offers fragments or equivalent so you get them passively from doing the optimal thing to progress the “mainline” goal. Bozja’s system is 100% not perfect

And in answer to your last example yes I’d be totally happy to support a system like that, if you can either pay for it or get it yourself by doing something semi time consuming I 100% support that design, because that’s what an MMO is to me (maybe that’s because I grew up with RuneScape)