Before anything lemme clarify that I'm relatively a new player(hit 60 just days after 3.2 landed) so my opinion is based solely on my experience with the current patch.

Personally I don't share that feeling towards tome farming. It never felt a chore, and most of the time I was capped in a matter of 3-4 days. Both of the dungeons in this patch still feel enjoyable to me, even after all that repetition and drex is only a partial source of my lore tomestones. In fact most of mine used to come from hunting since HW A and S rank marks provide a decent amount for a 2min job.
However tackling hard content like Ex primals and Savage is something that doesn't interest me whatsoever, was never a hardcore player, so I also don't have that "drive" you describe above to have BiS gear. My ilvl226 WHM is more than enough to get me through 90% of the content and that's enough for me.
From my point of view it's not the game that's an issue, it's the community. A very minor percentage of the content is designed to cater specifically to a hardcore portion of the playerbase as it should be. It's hard, no question about it, and needs you to know the fight inside and out as well as your selected class. However all of these are designed to be doable with the BiS gear of the previous patch if my understanding of the game design is correct. Does it leave room for error when that is the case? No, it doesn't, you and 7 other people have to be flawless in your run. The higher gear you procure with every patch is just a way to give you wiggle room. And let's face it, when you aim to clear that kind of content you wanna maximize your chances which breeds the high requirements the community sets. Which also comes as no surprise since most of the time you'll end up with some people that can't perform at the level that content requires.

What I can understand and agree though is the option to select your method of aquiring tomes without being "penalized" if you choose to not do drex when you only have limited time to spend in the game during most of your week(I saw above someone arguing what you need the gear for if you don't have time to do other things but he clearly forgot that people might not have more than an hour or two daily during the week but be able to spend significantly more online during weekends, when they might wanna raid or whatever.). But what makes Drex the "dominant" lore source? The daily bonus! It's not that other methods should give more tomes, but there should be a system where you get one daily tome bonus from ANY method you choose. However getting that bonus would nullify all others. Maybe set drex to also give dated resources(as a roulette, not as dungeon rewards) and enable you to manually activate a special bonus in whatever DR you want that would give those extra 30-40 tomes once a day. Or a player buff that comes up on reset which gives you extra tomes the first time you get them from any source during your day. Or...Or...well I dunno, I'm out of ideas but you get the point.