The more I think about it, the more I believe that part the issue lies with the shards themselves.
Shards are abundant and highly specialized.
The abundancy of the shards is partly releated to the fact that the game sprinkles some shards everywhere to beef-up the loot and make sure that most encounters drop something.
In practice, since they are so common, it is rarely worth the time to pick-up a shard.
However, since shards are so specialized you still have to pick-up shards to a certain extent.
While you might be drowing in certain shards, the consumption rate is not uniform and you might be running out of others; and running out of “basic” shards would be really bad.
The only way to target-farm a shard is to fracture for it, however that is very boring to do.
Class-specific shards are usually what this treatment is reserved to.
I got close to running out of non class-specific shards only once, I edited my filter to show fracturable items with the affixes I was running out of and the problem fixed itself.
However I’d argue that that was tolerable because it was a one-time thing for only a couple of affixes.
I don’t mind shattering for rare affixes, however, having to shatter for dozen of common shards would really suck the fun out of the game for me.
This produces an environment where it simultaneously feels mandatory and pointless to pick-up shards.
The solution that this thread proposes simplifies the choice associated to picking up the shards.
Auto-loot is the extreme version of this, where picking up shards is not a choice at all.
However, I sort of think that this would only offset the problem.
You would still end up with thousands of shards that you will probably never use, the only way of target-farming for shards would still be fracturing, and the shards monolith reward would still remain pointless.
I really hope that some form of shard sink is in the works, or some blanket improvements to the shard system.
