I'll put my tally as someone who likes the Atma set up as is. I think there are a few reasons I'm in the "go atma!" camp.

1) I never grinded fates when leveling so I don't mind doing them now. I enjoy reading the fate text and learning a little bit more about the lore of the world
2) I didn't try to get it done all in one go. I have absolutely no idea how many hours I spent collecting atma in all reality. I'd usually work on it between DF queues or when I wanted to play but wasn't sure when I was going to log out so didn't want to commit to instance play.
3) I never compared myself to others. Did many people get atma faster than me? probably but I was not paying attention to that what so ever.
4) I don't mind RNG. In fact in most cases I prefer RNG to token systems. I feel this game relies on token systems way too much. I remember at 2.0 a huge chunk of my fc would cap their tomes and have absolutely NOTHING to do in the game. Many people quit because of that. It's still a problem imho. So I personally think more RNG content in this game is sorely needed and atma filled that void.