Recent thoughts about Orange Essence since Preseason

Hey guys,

I've been thinking a lot about the changes to Influence Points/Blue Essence and to Orange Essence recently. We all know that this has been a controversial topic in other threads (Thread1, Thread2, Thread3, ...). There was also a pretty interesting post by Thunderneedle that is called Blue Essence, a review in numbers. He clearly points out that you get less BE in the new system than you would have gotten in the old one.

Especially the changes made to OE is bothering me, though. In their dev blog RIOT Bubobubo and Riot Cactopus state [Source]:

> Since you’ll be getting so many more shards thanks to the new leveling system (and with other recent changes to honor and events), we’ll tune down the relative value of the essence you get from disenchanting shards of all types—champ shards, skin shards, and ward skin shards.

I've been playing a whole bunch of games lately and felt like I was getting much less rewards like Key Fragments. Additionally, there wasn't any reason to change OE in the first place, was there? I mean merging IP and BE is one thing, but it had nothing to do with OE.

TL;DR: Am I the only one thinking Riot only changed OE to make the system feel more rewarding, if you spend money on it?