Rune pages for new players

It feels like rune pages are punishingly expensive for new players. Players leveling up want to spend their BE on new champs, because that's exciting. Spending RP for skins is exciting. Rune pages are not exciting, whether you're spending BE or RP, it feels more like a tax. I've seen some comments like "you have plenty of time during champ select to change your runes", but that assumes you already know what you want. New players have to juggle a lot of information, and throwing one more thing that they need to memorize is overwhelming/demoralizing. New players are exactly the kind of person extra rune pages help, because they can take their time to figure out runes for each champ. After someone has spent hundreds of hours in the game, they probably know the game well enough that they _could _ change their runes on the fly and buying more pages is pure convenience.

I've been playing with a couple noobs trying to teach them the game, and I kind of cringed when they wanted to make a new rune page and we checked the store to see how much they were. It also seems to discourage branching out to try other champs (since you have to keep swapping runes around on your 2 free pages).

If this was intended as a BE sink for players that have too much, I can understand that. But $5 or the equivalent BE of a "new" tier champ for a single rune page seems steep for beginners.