I believe the problem Turbine faces is the following: TR'ing is extremely popular but it is hardly profitable for Turbine. The reason for this is threefold. First, it is relatively easy to obtain TR hearts for free ingame by running a series of epic quests. Second, the price of a TR heart in the store, 1495, is too high to be a serious alternative. Third, the person who TR's has the option to regain 800 TP from favor rewards, which reduces spending by players considerably. Hence, Turbine is making little money on one of their most prominent features.

TR'ing is one of the few features that people are willing to pay for; but at the moment it is completely free and it actually gives players MORE money. Hence, it makes sense to change the system to actually make players pay for TR'ing. As a response, Turbine seems to want to make the free ingame option less interesting, to trigger people to buy TR hearts from the store. However, the proposed way through epic sagas seems very dishonest to me. I think there are better ways to achieve this.

Therefore, I propose the following. Instead of making a dishonest new system, be honest about your profit maximizing goals. Don't create a tedious new system for obtaining reincarnation items ingame, but remove ingame vendors for hearts completely. Correspondingly, reduce the cost of TR hearts in the store to 700-800. This is a reasonable price, as you can gain back these costs from the favor rewards that you are allowed to regain. Then you are at least honest about your profit maximizing aims, while asking a defendable price for your product. Such honesty will be appreciated and players are more likely to live with this than with the proposed new system.