That’s you, not everyone. In principle, the idea of distillates reducing “grind to deeper endgame” should make them quite appealing to a certain type of player (see @Onevia’s comment).
The problem isn’t the distillates as and of themselves, it’s the fact the SWL cache design focuses so strongly on that type of player it won’t appeal much to anyone else. For someone mostly interested in cosmetics - i.e. the kind of player that kept TSW afloat with those clothing packs - SWL caches suck and blow at the same time. It will be cheaper to buy the vanity items off the AH from distillate chasers.
Maybe it is the fact SWL Patron is fairly bad value for the kind of player with a stable income who’s a regular ‘weekend warrior’? The design paradigm to punish Patrons for not logging in daily may be great from a ‘pad daily player numbers’ perspective, but it is not actually going to endear SWL to people who’d prefer to play on their own, different terms.
You are not alone. I find myself thinking I’ll probably blow a big chunk of my summer MMO budget on STO’s new expansion despite the fact those Victory is Life packs are mostly expensive silliness. Still, at least I’ll be getting something more interesting than distillates/more valuable than Hexcoins…
That’s not even a silly argument, that’s basically the opposite of an argument. It’s, “If you want to assess value, stack the deck in keys’/Funcom’s favor.” If you actually cared for a reasonably objective assessment of key value, you’d have to ask either for a balanced sample of different caches or a large sample of the current cache that new players would actually see dropping like candy.