why is the SWTOR community so against "pay to win"

Why would I waste my time grinding out the best gear when I could easily buy it for pennies in comparison to the amount of time I'd invest? pay to win games are boring.

Yes because incessant grinding isn't boring at all.

But why do you want this? What problem are you trying to solve? What's wrong with having to go to the GTN, or craft it yourself, or use planetary commendations?

P2W is not natural for an MMO.
It's the equivalent of using God mode in a single player game. Yeah, it's fun to completely destroy your enemies without them being able to so much as scratch you, but for how long and at what cost?

I don't think you fully realize the repercussions of what you're suggesting.

- Crafting would be dead. Why go to the trouble of re-ing, crafting and trying to sell an item that is hard and costly to make when someone else would be able to just buy it and resell it on the GTN making the same (if not more) amount of credits?

- Running operations would also die out. Operations are fun but after a few runs, once you've learned the tactics and downed the bosses a few times, they become unbearably repetitive. What would be the point in trying to get the gear when you could buy it for CC or from the GTN?

- The effects of P2W would ripple out of the game's economy. People are less willing to try out a game that's notoriously P2W (see the hundreds of "F2P" games out there that are not really F2P because in order to be competitive you need to spend massive amounts of money). Others would leave because they'd see no reason in trying hard to get something others can simply buy with money.

As someone else already mentioned, the whole point of a game is that no matter how much money you have in real life, in the game you're only as good as your skill and gear. The only thing that should count in a game is that you understand how to play and how to gear your characters. Anything more than fluffy vanity items that only enhance the way your character looks, would cause a severe unbalance in the game's economy and its general standing in the MMO community.

As for color crystals, the one and only reason why the CM crystals have not completely destroyed Artifice is because the colors offered for direct purchase or through cartel packs are not the same colors as the ones offered by Artifice.

crafting pretty much is dead with things like CM adaptives, CM dyes, and CM crystals, which all give superior things for less effort than getting to artifice 450 to make a crystal not featured in the collections tab.

ops are completely boring for the same thing you said: "once you've learned the tactics and downed the bosses a few times, they become unbearably repetitive."

P2W is completely natural for an MMO, how do you think they make their money?!

ok, so maybe absolutely any level of P2W is bad, but maybe they could make spending money more convenient instead of becoming a god with a couple $100 bills. for instance paying money for a subscription will let you teleport to anywhere you want or make you're mount go 120%. that is a way that doesn't effect gameplay but makes things easier for you.