I use to feel similar - I thought it was an oversight that they'd fix . . . But they didn't.

I reported it, I brought it up on Reddit as Serenade linked, I think I even tried asking about it during a dev QA . . . But nothing happened.

It's been months and it's not been a secret by any stretch of the imagination. There comes a point after you've done your part to make sure things are as they should be where you either have to accept that it's probably intended or just potentially miss out. I can't blame Sere over here for not wanting to shoot himself in the foot because the devs might have just needed more than 4 months to change the shop price of rune hastas, because why would they need that time?

I've actually reported a lot of bugs over the course of DS and they are very frequently fixed by the next update, this is by no means something that would be hard to fix.

I think that it's just the fact that they don't want smithing to be garbage.

There's simply no item sink for rune items without this sort of thing.

Things of rune hatchets for example. Will most players really need more than one or two . . . Ever?

Probably not. And even when someone loses one it very well could just be another player, it'd be a net neutral situation in the overall economy.

Rune armour sets? Same deal. If they did make rune armour better (through making it T65 to match royal for example, not a suggestion just an example) we'd see a massive surge in demand for them but it'd eventually leave us in a situation where . . . Well, we've got thousands of rune sets in the game and when someone loses it it's probably going to another player so it doesn't really change anything.

So what can they do to deal with the tens of thousands of runite ore coming into the game? Well, just leave us with halfway decent alchable to smith.