I would like to see clusters breakable into crystals and then those breakable into shards.
It would be nice if mobs also dropped shards according to their elemental affinity. As it is I am sure the shard demand is being partly filled by rmt and botters.

Looking at some of the recipes it kind of gets ridiculous the amount of shards used.
It seems like in your attempt to stop rmt you have only hurt legit players and not stopped rmt.