Personally, my main issue with shards is the crappy wards skills we have to increase the amount of shards we gather...
I hate buying things on the market that I can gather myself but then there's no way I'm spending hours of gathering shards at a rate of 1 shard per hit with only x3 boost every 4 minutes on a single node... It's also stupid that the benefit of the ward skill is the same for shards, crystals and clusters since you pretty much gather them at the same rate but you require much more shards for crafts. I'm at a point where I need 1000 of multiple shards to get my master main hand tools and obviously, in the current state, I'd be buying them of the MB for 80K gils per stacks of 1000, directly supporting RMT...
I think they really need to redesign this skill and the associated traits so that the skill is based on duration (or X number of nodes) and the trait is

Something like that:
-(Skill) XXX's Ward: Increases shard yield by two for the next 60s (or whatever the duration, should be enough to last 3-4 nodes).
-(Trait) Ward of the Twelve I: Extends gathering ward increases to Crystals and add 1 additional yield to shards.
-(Trait) Ward of the Twelve II: Extends gathering ward increases to Clusters and add 1 additional yield to shards.

So in the end you'd have a skill that would be active for about 3-4 nodes and would yield:
- 5 shards per hit effectively giving a boost of 64 shards every 4 minutes (assuming the skill lasts 4 nodes). I'm expecting you'd gather a bit more than 100 shards in 10 min which decent.
- 3 crystals per hit effectively giving a boost of 32 crystals every 4 minutes (though it'll be less since only 2 nodes per set gives crystals)
- 3 clusters per hit, will remain as-is since the node is only available at certain time.

Personally, that would make life much easier and I'd definitely be more willing to gather shards for myself or to sell.
And since the skill and traits are only available at mid/high level, bots would be less likely to benefit from it.