Buying Mastery?

Quote from Wingfield: "Our latest foray was champion mastery levels 6 & 7, which grants players new mastery badge emotes, new loading screen border flags and announcement banner upgrades. This enables players to show off their favorite champions through a combination of skill and investment. We wanted to make sure the rewards were accessible to all of you so we added the ability to use IP to get them."

Does this mean you can buy mastery ranks? That feels a bit... Cheap. I mean, it is only IP which isn't as bad as just the richest people get rank 6/7, but people already felt that getting Rank 5 was kind of weak since you could get it just by playing, winning and losing only affected how fast you got it. Now the last bastion of Challenge, Ranks 6 and 7 where you need to get so many S quality games to obtain this ranking, can be bought with IP? How does that make sense? How is getting Rank 6 or 7 any sort of accomplishment when it's marred by the fact that you can just buy it with IP? Even just accelerating the process with IP just makes it feel like those who actually worked towards it wasted there time.

Anyone else have thoughts on this?