I'd personally be more against rune stones than refines. Keys are available everywhere and propably thats the most efficient item to get from moon shop. Because of that players have more incentive to stack p1 (because they actually have resources) which delays filling the gap between your own p1 and p234 even more. If I dont want this, why dont I simply neglect lv13 14 runes and * to upgrading p234? Because cave keys are easily obtainale and current p1 stacking meta of other people will force me to upgrade p1 to stay relevant. Now if refines are mostly unavailable (and they arent efficient that much, see below) its good to have them, because you can hoard those items over time and when the time comes, youll actually have something to upgrade. It doesnt hurt YOUR account progression as much as runes.

One key rebate (1050) gives about between 1/3 to 1/2 progress from lv11->lv12 stone, which on average makes 2-3 rebates to upgrade 1 rune. If leveling costs followed same pattern as 11->12, then it would take 3-4.5 rebates to upgrade a single rune to lv13, and then 4.5~7 to get that rune to lv14. I dont even have full 5x lv12 yet, and at this point i dont want to be forced to upgrade p1 even more.

China had yellow refines in sun coin shop for 200/1 in the picture, which makes it the most cost efficient item after bond scroll packs. It takes 1500 refines to lvl up and stat increase goes from 665->910, which is 245gain (490with max purification). That takes 94.5k coupons to lvl up a single refine (shop price). Lets break that into smaller numbers. Would you pay 9.5k cp for 49 of each secondary stats for jsut 1 position? No. Thats (more or less) equivalent of 7 bt pills in stats, so youd get around 100bp. Considering the cost this feature has pretty bad efficiency ratio (10cp:1bp), not as bad as battle armor but still its on lower end of the spectrum.

Problem with those features will lie solely in where those refines will be available and at what price/ammounts. If they won't be s*fed to players in crazy ammounts in recharge events, nobody (ftp folk) will care, same as with advanced threads. If they are event only (not activities like swb, spacetime) we are good. People who spend for them sure will get better p1, but that ammount of money could have been invested more efficiently. That applies to people around your bp, theres no point in competing ftp with whale and saying the gap will be larger because thats obvious and you shouldnt even think of competing with whales in the first place.

Tl;dr refines are good as long as they arent given away in hundreds in recharge/spend events. For low spenders their implementation isnt end of the world, its just a feature that will increase one's power in a year or so for the first time. People who are against this are whales, who dont want to be forced to spend a lot of $ on non efficient feature just because you will find mroe competitive whale who will do so.