I sincerely doubt your statement that "without weapons we raid more". I rather think it is the other way around, since obtaining weapons has moved to khitai HM and rare token grind for various reasons.
I can only repeat things from the deleted european forum then:
- the progress of t1/t2 aquirance of gear is in no way linked to artificially leaving out weapons of the system. It is just not logical to leave them out...and as you can see ingame, the blackmail carrot (or as you say social motivation) is NOT working. People are not signing for more raids and longer for raids...they just stop or get frustrated like noite. He did what you said, he lead raids for YEARS...without getting what he wanted.
- which brings me to a second point. Token systems are a way to let players choose what they like. No need to take out the luck element, despite what people might think, it will still be there. Just look at khitai nm and other instances there. Adding tokens for weapons will NOT decrease the popularity. And if they are useful for even other stuff or convertable, it will result in MORE raids, not less, joined even by people who don't need the gear anymore. Not like now (again citing noite), when people get the items and stop playing.
- Speed. Tokens do not have to speed up things...in this regard being lucky is unargueable the fastest way to gear up. There is a middle ground, but artificially disabling the token system for a random chosen part of the progression is just clueless...sorry funcom, because it is NOT working.
- also there is the issue of obtaining "non class" items or the ninja drama. A token addition would solve it once and for all...less drama. There is a certain kind of social interaction, i am not sad to loose.
about your points:
- the speed can be adjusted, both in droprates and token cost
- weapons dropping from lastboss can be solved by adjusting drop rate from them and cost as well
- unless you remove random drops, you will always keep the surprise and luck effect and people will still keep killing the final bosses...and even if not, when the cost of weapons is high enough, then what harm is done, since raids have cooldowns and those managing to down the last ones, will get additional chances by luck AND get tokens faster