Yes, you are absolutely correct. Newer players are more likely to want to just unlock most exotics and try them, so maybe I should have used slightly more experienced players as an example. Those players who kinda know what exotics they would like to use but still don't posses enough materials to fully masterwork a full set of armor with an exotic. Asking them to pay 3 shards to possibly get a better roll is a heavy price. Lost sector farming seems to stay but here the issues of rng become a problem once more. While many of us have made friends and play with them, there still is a sizeable portion of the playerbase who play mostly solo, are deterred by lfg or the hardest content. Surprisingly few have ever even completed a raid. Their most reliable way of getting their scarce materials, like shards, are in the season pass and vendors. To them focusing most likely just isn't worth it. Even I don't think it's worth it. The coming in-game lfg should hopefully alleviate this problem but its hard to say how much. And I understand that Bungie propably wants to avoid "rich getting richer" problem but veteran players can much more easily replace the losses on things like prisms and shards whereas more casual players would struggle to even focus the few exotics they want. 1 shard price on direct focusing would most likely not be too steep of a price for more casual players and would atleast force veterans to gather more materials at some point. That being said, there is still a hard cap on how powerful one can be in terms of stats and most builds are more than adequate without the absolute min-maxing some hardcore players do.