I know I'm not the only one who sees cosmetics being more expensive nowadays

Hear me out: when you take a look back at League either from the beginning or even around 2015, cosmetics were pretty different in terms of pricing. The average skin you'd find would be 975, all of them would be decent, and occasionally have 1350 skins pop up every now and again. On top of that, when Riot first introduced loading borders in the first PROJECT launch, it was just "buy these skins early at full price and get something while you're game is loading" Didn't cost anything more, just buy now and earn a small reward. Simple and kind of nice.

Fast forward to today and it feels like the tables suddenly turned. Nowadays we're given more 1350 skins and 975 & lower are more rare. This year alone so far (and I looked and counted), we've only gotten 4 skins that were 975, 5 if you count Conquerer Varus (since I guess he's related to ESports and there's some weird thing about those not being counted towards skins or something). But that's just this year so far. If you keep looking down the list, it's just 1350+ skins up around late 2015 - early/mid 2016 when we started this transition. Not to mention how Riot has been charging for loading borders, now only in bundles. Speaking of which, let's not forget that they're also making one particular chroma bundle exclusive, so if you want it you need to buy every other chroma that you may not want.

Don't get me wrong, 1350 skins are good in quality (at least a majority for the most part IMO), chromas have significantly improved, I still like to get loading borders and I'm happy to get all of these when I can. But to see this shift from occasionally getting one or a batch of really good but more expensive skins to now just constantly pumping them out, having to be charged extra for something that you could just get free in the past, and making things only exclusive in bundles for limited times feels...unsatisfying as a consumer. I'm pretty much at the point where I want to take advantage of early sales & end of month bundles to save RP due to how pricing is going and also might as well give up on loading borders if I continually have to pay extra for them.