Yeah, I think people have a valid reason to complain. The HW relic was equivalent of 14000ish tomes per relic. Of course, there were options to obtain about 8000-poetics-worth of those items by other methods (dailies for example). But in reality, think about it. How different is it? Either you run a leveling roulette 3 times to get 18 Singing Clusters or you spam dungeons to earn tomes to buy them.

I don't think people realize that when you break it down the ARR, HW, EW and to some extent ShB relics were pretty much all the same. After you cleared Bozja, you could obtain most of the memories from doing non-Bozja content. If anything, at least the EW has an actual parallel quest you do along the way. There really wasn't anything to ARR and HW. Just an NPC that said "gee, can you now go fetch X items for me?"

It's all the same.