It needs to be 200-250 tech frags to make it worthwhile for me to pick it up. I haven't picked up any drops for years, outside of pve content and bosses that drop gear, because none of the drops are worth the time to pick up. I don't even pick up credits the 137 or so credits from a mob because I make enough through gtn and there much better ways to earn credits in the game these days.

Going to have to agree with OP here. This new gearing system is actually easier than spamming hammer station. Everyone and their moms now know how to do NiM nefra and dash'ode now, which is great for the endgame content community. Not only that, but doing ops now will make you rich from the tech frag drops, and then you trade for rpms/oems. I have no idea why people are so insistent on not doing ops, even just SM ops. It's really easy to speedrun through sm ops for some ops currency. Story mode karagga's palace can be done in literally 35 minutes if your team is good and wants to speedrun it for the techfrags and ops currency to upgrade your rakata gear. At most KP SM will take 45 minutes even if your team is not too experienced, which is still a good rate for techfrags farming or ops catalyst.

Ouch. It's ok, think of it this way, you did your part to help slow down inflation in this game by 0.0001%. You have my respect.

I have the sprint champion achievement and was doing EC consistently under 15 mins every time I wanted to try to farm this boss battle minigame for the rancor mount. It takes me at least 30 minutes now. Haven't seen anyone mention it, but heroic moment is now really weak. Heroic moment was important in speeding through EC for the achievement. How people got sprint champion before was that you had to pop heroic moment and use all the legacy abilities as they did HUGE damage. Using legacy orbital strike from heroic moment on the first boss in EC while you mashed your rotation with a high-parsing DPS class would wipe him in 10 seconds or less. You can youtube this, even tanks with dps gear (skank tanks) were able to do EC in under 15 minutes with heroic moment abilities before.