Everyone would like an easier way to heat up their gear. People hold back on crafting more 5* weapons simply because they can't heat them to full power, let alone that people have enough radiants to fully heat their shields. The reason for this discrepancy I do not know... is it that the devs want to sell crystals on the store, or do they want players to play through the hardest levels before they can complete their arsenal? Whatever the reason, getting radiant crystals basically only after d27 is too discouraging for the majority of players. Although now that I think about it, it probably doesn't have anything to do with the difficulty of the levels, considering danger missions don't drop radiants and in order to get to other d27 you usually have to spend most of your time getting through boring/easy lead up levels with bad rewards. (DaN first levels/cutscenes or d19-d26 clockworks)
A commonly suggested idea is to have lower tier fire crystals be able to combine into higher tier ones. I feel like a lot of players want this because they are tempted by the idea of being able to spend their 10k+ shining crystals and easily heat up the rest of their gear they had to keep at lvl 1 or 5 for years.
What if we could craft our shining crystals to radiants at a rate of 5 shinings for 3 radiants, but with the additional requirement of a ton of specific materials on a rotation of sorts. Lore wise it could be called the Chaos Forge, where you throw in a bunch of materials + 5 shining crystals and in return get the 3 radiants. The material rotation could be tied to the clockworks rotation, so every week you can find the materials you need inside the clockworks. If we want it to be harder, another option could be 3 shinings for 1 radiant crystal, along with the bunch of materials.
Eventually people will burn through all their stored up shining crystals and materials, and they'll once again need to venture into the clockworks for more materials, shining crystals and radiant crystals at deeper levels. This could help to give a new purpose to crafting materials and create a new market for them, as well as encourage people to seek out all levels in the clockworks rather than just the ones with the highest crown payout. Also whenever new armor/weapons are released like with the sleep update, people will be low on materials from forging and will have to go adventuring to be able to craft the new stuff. The sleep update did this by adding the Zee Cores to list of materials, and it was a lot of fun to go hunting for them, except with this, players would have to go adventuring even for old armor sets that they didn't craft yet, not just the new ones.
I think in this area, you'll find two kinds of players. You have the grinders and the spenders.
GH has given players the option to simply buy these necessary items through the supply depot. This is what people who are happy with simply buying energy to get gear they want or level things up. While yes they do cost a pretty penny, and it adds up for how many you truly need to fully heat up your gear, if things were more instantaneous and it took less time to grind for the same number of crystals of course the price of these in the supply depot would need to decrease. This would equate to people having their final gear faster. Generally in these games the fun is all about collecting things and building up to where you want to be. So for the players who go through the grinding effort of leveling up gear, they have a different amount of respect for how truly demanding it is to get the gear all the way heated up.
Not saying a chance would be a bad thing, but I could see it impacting the SK economy in different ways depending on how it was laid out. Simply making something drop more or more common and there for costing less, would mean less energy to level up gear and people not needing as much, ie. spending less for those pay to play players. Meaning GH wouldn't make as much money. All a balancing act.