Well they have to have a way to make fates relevant. As it is, hardly anyone does them in the HW areas at all, at least on my server and even then it's specific ones. There are plenty of fates I pretty much can't complete because they require a large amount of players (or at least something resembling a party) in order to complete successfully within the time limit.

This is a way to make that content relevant again. Yeah, it is kind of unimaginative since it is essentially the same process we did with 2.x relics all over again and yeah, that part is a shame. I would have much preferred some actual difficult quests or something, but that's asking too much for the developers of the game. Since everything is geared to be easy with exception to Savage Mode raids (and I'll even throw in the HW EX trials in there though I'm sure some don't feel they are that hard).

I don't really like it but I do kind of understand the reason why they need to make the content relevant. Even though it's only going to help meagerly for the next month or so.