You make 300m without using a loot scroll?  Yeah I doubt that.  His claim was no food, draught, scrolls, or crystals.  He was talking about stripping down to no buffs at all.  Also you are using 2 buffs and likely have crystals in your gear.

Safe to say you can ignore Zandek entirely, the fella is like, a karmabomber on steroids.

Has a guild

But uses an alt-account for GM

Has 30 members in the guild

Oh wait, they're all his lvl 1 alt accounts

Claims he can grind as well as anyone else without any consumables or crystals

Probably hasnt touched any form of challenging combat in the game after losing a duel back in 2018...

Maybe we could have some function where crystals aren't destroyed, but do lose durability, or 'potency' or 'magic affinity' (insert whatever word you like) upon defeat/death, which has to be restored with a price incurred comparable to the crystals worth.

For arguments sake; You may loose 1% of a crystal's durability upon death, to restore 1% durability costs 1 unit of some 'Magical Substance'. The Magical Substance is obtained by grinding/heating/whatever a crystal of comparable worth. E.g. if your equipped Black Magic Crystals durability reduces you need to grind a Black Magical Crystal up to obtain the appropriate Magical Substance. Perhaps multiples of lesser tier crystal Magical Substance could be combined in some way with an additional alchemy reagent, to make higher tier Magical Substance. 

I guess in this way, it would lessen the burden and cost of having crystal break upon defeat, however a) still incurr some penalty so death is not trivialised, and b) hopefully still keep the crystal market/economy supply & demand going.

See thing is, crystal breakage was one thing when they were worth 50,000 silver tops, now crysals are worth 350m and hard to reobtain once lost.  Even in 2016 you could make 10m an hour, which was well over the cost to resupply crystals.  Compare that to now where crystals are worth 350m, depending on the spot you make between 100m to 700m an hour, even at the best spots you are only making enough to cover 2 crystals an hour.

Yes. Both these points I took into account, which hopefully is clear when looking at the detail.

It could be abused with the current system. Friend flags hits you once and then you are immune to crystal breaks in pve. 

Putting a repair cost on crystals would be nice but also break the market for them. Getting fed to mobs really sucks though. You shouldn't lose 300m crystals because of pvp unless you are neg karma.

In my opinion unless you are at least a 5% far as gear and PvP class goes. Using crystals are just going to cost you more then not using them. If you are at any of the decent grind spots. The PKers will come in camo suit to harass and mob feed you. When you decline their demand to DFS. So instead of making like 20% less silver per hour using cheap throw away while grinding. You'll just end up with these PKers destroying billions in silver of your crystals. Meaning you'll be grinding for a high loss. Until these Devs stop allowing this to happen.

My solution to this issue is to make all Open World PvP fights equalized fights. And balance all specs of every class, so the difference in power from the weakest to the strongest is +/- 10% PvP combat effectiveness. Which is a pipe dream. Because these Devs make money from people just looking to get a unfair advantage to harass others. But since the people who abuse those the most have heavy pushback against such things.