it's the only way to transfer mods! A tool. Who cares how it looks. Remember, all amorings are slot specific. Eg when you pull out the black hole helm amoring you have to stick it in a BoL head..IMO the 5 main pieces are almost mandatory if you ever plan on gearing an alt from your mains overflowing columi/BH comms

That sand armor (and announcement) makes this event worthwhile. Easy to obtain BoL gear. (Other than the legacy vendor stuff that is 100-250k per piece) It's easily worth over a million credits. I don't think many people realize that BoL gear is the only way to transfer and gear up alts using bound mods from any source and any level.

Biggest reason: They want to remove high end speeders from the vendors, for economic reasons, and shift that market to the players (via BOE craftable armstech). The credits funnel back into the players (making crafting more worthwhile), and the mats value increases (making gathering more worthwhile). As a side effect they didn't want to make these speeders craftable for whatever reason. Maybe not worth the effort and maybe because they do think it will be a good idea to let the "founders" only have them.