Only problem I'm feeling from this is that farming shards is still the same boring task as before. Culinary still uses lots of shards, and you occasionally need 2.0 ingots and thread for the new 3.0 crafts.

I need a couple hundred wind shards for basilisk whetstones, and probably a few thousand fire shards for leveling culinary. Strange that crystals and clusters are now so much faster to farm than shards.