I'm sure I'm not alone in this, but the umbrite step of the anima weapon is awful. It's not even about the rate of acquisition, but simply that spamming Gubal or whatever other dungeon over and over and over and over is not particularly fun. The crystal sands are a vastly superior design, allowing for some diversity in how I can grind for them. I can do levequests or beast tribe dailies or even buy them off the MB. The entire anima weapon is very lore intensive, and while I expect that to some extent, it would be nice if in the future more was done to alleviate the monotony of the longer steps by avoiding forcing people to do simple instance spam to get through it, even if the other options aren't necessarily as efficient.