The problem isn't needing the shells; I, for one, couldn't care less about having to have the shells in my bank. The problem is needing the shells after two months of playing, earning gear, and throwing out shells. Now we have to grind another two months to earn all those shells back by RNG, then also grind warzones for all the components we need.
Meanwhile, PVE players can't upgrade gear the same way, even though it's all the same gear now. So if you're a PVE player who wants to upgrade, you have to hope and pray for RNG in Hard Mode (err... veteran?) operations to get better gear. (Or command crates, but the point in the 5.1 changes was to make gearing easier, wasn't it?) So as a PVEr, I'm now inclined to spend all my spare time playing PVP, because uprisings, FPs, etc don't help me gear and ops are few and far between these days because the player base is gone.