I would like to suggest that loyalty points be raised to 5 per item because it is very difficult to farm so many items. Or you could give us back the option of continuing to farm without opening Chi Breathing. Seems this part of game is a little bit unbalanced.
I think its fine for Icy and Tibet npc. The hassle is Hangzhou/Nanchang general merchants, that only take RC/FD/EC relics. They need 500 each, and they do not stack. So basically, to max loyalty on 2 npc for double banner trinkets, you´ll need to farm 40 full bags of relics. Thats very time consuming and storage consuming.