Sincere Question...No Troll...Has SE Gone Full Regress?!?!

[Absurdity]

The time until next patch is a poor basis of comparison. The relics become obsolete except as glam and the raw materials for the next step as soon as the next major patch drops. In order to be useful, they have to be available for a large fraction of the time between patches. So two weeks isn’t absolutely terrible, but it’s obnoxious; I and all the people I play with resented the process, and some of them just didn’t complete the quest because it was too much work. But the most significant indictment of first relic stage quests was that iirc SE themselves mentioned they’d listened to feedback on the first stage and made the second stage easier in response.

They become pretty much obsaolete as soon as you get them, until the very last patch in an expansion. There is no point in going for a relic as an actual gear upgrade until patch X.55, it's a glorified glamour stick. It is, at best, slightly better than an unaugmented tome weapon, most of the time it is worse than an upgraded crafted weapon.
If you're looking at it from that angle then every relic quest so far has been a horrible grind, because the amount of work you put into getting one is infinitely more than buying a weapon for 200k from the marketboard that easily gets you through 8 months of casual content.

And their so-called "fixed" second step was just making you run roulettes for the 500th time, which I guess is technically easier.