I'm halfway through my the bs, working my way through the thicket of ToAU trying to get my nirvana, what really sucks is knowing a smn without nirvana is only good enough to farm an nirvana ahaaha.....
That's not true.
There is nothing in this game that requires a SMN having a Nirvana over the other two options, literally.
What you meant to say is "people are stupid and parrot that you need a Nirvana, so I'm parroting the same in hope they'll invite me".
People who mention Nirvana being mandatory are people you should specifically not pay attention to.
I for one am happy its still a rough weapon to make. Separates the scrubs from the real players. Can do a mythic in a month or so now, when I made my first relic all those years ago it took almost a year of patience. Now you can buy a relic and have it 119'd in about 10 days (including wait times from that darned goblin...)
Can make a AG a relic by this time tomorrow. Gob doesn't have waits like it used to. (Still some but not like it used to be.)
It takes a little more than 3 hours to make a relic, it's indeed really fast nowadays.
Mythic completion time is dictated by Einherjar so it's 50~ hours minimum. You can very well clear everything else within those 50~ hours (an Einherjar run is 3min roughly).
I'm not counting Alexandrites in this calculation for many reasons, the two main ones being that a lot of people bot Salvage whenever they have free time/they're sleeping/CP campaign isn't on and that people make a lot of money through other activities which serve to buy Alexandrites in one go.