For a while now, shard prices have been quite high (80+ gil on my server). My guess is SE did a good job of wiping out RMT bots. However, this hasn't really encouraged miners to provide as steady a stream of shards as before. Very few will sell them in 1,000 packs, which is typical for high-volume crafting.

I'd like to see if SE can pull off increasing the number of shards per strike without drawing the bots back. increasing it tenfold would be risky but threefold would make things a bit quicker for those who want to do some large-scale crafting.