My experience with Level 6 and 7 Mastery so far

Let me start off by saying that, on the whole, I love the idea of this. I love the fact that you can now go past 5. I love that it takes S ranks to do it. I got to 6 in three games, and disenchanted all the champion shards I had in order to get enough blue essence to upgrade. Here's where things start to fall off. For anyone who's unaware, once you hit level 6 mastery, in order to get the three required tokens for level 7 you need S or S+ games, not S-. However, the problem I keep running into is that if you're doing so well that you're going to get an S or S+, they almost always surrender before you have gotten a high enough score to get that rank. This makes playing at your best a punishment, rather than a reward. Maybe implement a system where if the game is shorter than expected, the required amount of k/d/a, cs, turrets, etc, is lower? And if that's already the case, then maybe reevaluate the numbers that apply to it.

The second issue I have with it is that it costs 600 blue essence to go from level 6 to 7. This issue is twofold; I have been getting chests as often as possible always waiting for the next one to be available. I had only two champion shards, and that was barely enough to disenchant for the 500 to get to mastery 6. I have plenty of chests waiting to be opened, but I can't get keys for weeks at a time until the drop rate resets. The second part of my issue with it costing essence is that players should not be required to pay for champion mastery when they clearly have the skill level necessary. If you got something like a skin for that champion at the same time, then I could see including Hextech Crafting in the process. As it is however, it feels disjointed and out of place.

Some ways these issues could be mitigated might be:

Changing the requirements for S and S+ on shorter games Changing the requirements for getting level 7 mastery Remove the Hextech Crafting aspect of the mastery system Make the drop rate of keys, which falls off after a certain number of keys, be more gradual. So instead of getting one every other win when the drop rate resets, make it less likely in the beginning, but don't make it impossible to get keys after six or so are gotten. Let there be other ways to earn chests, or let people get more than one chest per champion.

If anyone else has any ideas on how to improve this, would love to hear it.