The proposed conversion rate of medals (4 to 1 of the next rarity) would mean, on average, farming more medals than if you had just gambled them away in various attempts to elite level the same troop. If you were to “trade up” over many rarities (for example, trying to get those Cedrics up to Nysha), you are losing a lot of potential upgrades - 1 Nysha medal elite bronzes a mythic(+10k souls), 27 cedrics elite bronze 1 mythic on average (+90k souls), and 1 Nysha medal would cost 64 cedrics were you to upgrade (+31k souls). And yes, I know you could technically do it with 3 medal of Anu, which would be 48 cedrics for bronze, but silver and gold would need to go all the way to Nysha for the guaranteed upgrade the cost of 64 cedrics per. The proposed soul cost could save some souls, but I don’t think many would be opposed if the conversion cost 10k souls as well.
The burn isn’t that it can’t be completed (well, for most of us), but it can’t be progressed in any significant way. By in large, the desirable troops to elite level at endgame are legendaries and mythics.
This system says no unless you gamble low rarity medals until you get lucky or grind top speed for tens of hours until you get lucky and get the right rarity medals. Both are unappealing for a large number of people, removing this as a goal entirely for them. I don’t need to be able to finish elite levels, but I want to be able to enjoy the process of putting them on the troops that I want. I used to with early explore and traitstones, I was planning to on again with medals… but it just didn’t come together like this, both for this reason, and the excessive amount of interface clicking that needs to be done in the interface that makes the process unpleasant. Funny that this system was apparently designed to combat obnoxious randomness of earning arcane traitstones, something that was not really that much of a problem, and then created a system ten times worse with tokens.
See also:
Needing to grind for tens of hours and needing to be lucky to make progress are concepts that are at odds with each other if your goal is crafting a fun experience. The infinigrind and massive soul costs penalties for attempting to add lower rarity medals to elite higher rarity troops are fine so long as there is a way to push past the RNG to make what can be considered progress. RNG is fine, but not at the tail end of an extremely long grind to see if you rolled a zero or not and your prize is some stat points that don’t generally represent some kind of major power shift (especially when you roll mostly zeroes, and your “reward” just isn’t big enough to make it compelling to interact with).
Given either of these suggestions, “completing” elite levels is still likely a completely impossible goal, but getting them on the troops you want might be slightly more palatable (but not technically any easier nor faster). Just that feeling of being able to sit down, play for an hour, and know you are a tiny fraction closer to your goal than when you started goes a long way to the psychology of making it appealing to use that hour on this game in the first place - a very important thing for a free to play game to do.