Crystalline Conflict's Ranking Rewards Suggestion

[Trucknbolts]

I was inspired to get into CC ranked this season because of the inclusion of the top 100 reward replicas, but today I decided to stop my climb in part because of Square Enixs' design philosophy and me not having done any research on how rewards worked until just the other day. This sudden research stemmed from the fact that my queue times at Gold 1 have all but dried up. Yesterday I sat around in queue for 30+ minutes at 6:00 PM EST and called it quits after playing 2 matches, needing to go cook dinner before raid time at 8:00pm.
I thought if I could just endure it until I got into diamond to get a few pieces of the rewards I was aiming for I'd be happy. After doing some Googling I found out that upon reaching diamond rank you receive 1 (ONE) commendation crystal for your efforts, which is not enough to buy anything at all. I'll need to wait another 5 months for a new season to begin in order to do the grind all over again, and that's just to get one singular piece from a full set if I even make it to diamond again. On top of that, I'd most likely sit in 30 minute long queues again because I dared put my focus on raiding at the start of the patch for the first few weeks, because for whatever reason both are tied to the same patch. I'd have to do this for years in order to assemble just ONE of the various sets I imagine will be implemented in the future, which is just insane to think about, and even more insane that they sat in an office and nodded their heads in agreement while discussing that before rolling out the rewards.

Why are the rewards so expensive? And why are the rewarded commendation crystals ONLY available for achieving a high rank exclusively? How on earth would anyone feel driven to enter into ranked PvP if the vast majority of the population going in wont see a single reward for the time they've put in? It has been 16 seasons and they've never once thought of this?

I agree with the OP's change suggestion, but I believe the rewards should be opened up even more.
My suggestion is to make 1 commendation crystal the baseline reward for getting bronze, and having the numbers increase as your rank does. This is how you get butts into seats, and people into queues. A player only looking to get into bronze and check out will be happy to receive the reward after a few seasons, and you'll potentially get others to keep playing if they can get to silver and immediately buy that piece of gear they were wanting, and so on. "Oh, I can get the entire set I was wanting by getting to diamond? Sweet I'll keep climbing."

Games like League, DOTA, Overwatch, and Street Fighter 6 all grant players of all ranks various rewards for just playing the game, and have been doing so for a very long time, and it has kept those games competitive and active because of it. I don't see the PvP experience improving in any way at all unless you give players a reason to want to do it. I'm sorry if I come off as a bit frustrated, I've wasted hours of my time in hopes of getting a reward I've waited years to get just to have my dream of finally having them again absolutely crushed by Square Enix's inexplicable aversion to giving players a reason to engage with their content, making it all but near impossible for me to get it unless I decide quit my job and raid team in order to sit in these ridiculous queues or buckle up and be prepared to PvP on its release week.