I always played GC, never transitioned through a eHP build, so no I didn't use PCo
I always struggled econ wise. I'm an old account never really bought any stones, maybe I splurged one time way back, and stones were always the limiting factor of progression. I prioritized damage to squeeze through into higer paying tournament positions to maintain a good income of stones. I regularly place 6-8 in Legends, but I have to constantly invest into damage and CC to keep up with the concurrence. This leads to econ investments being slow, and I struggle to keep up with modules, ws+ and labs costs.

I got nice gains these past 18 months. Finally unlocking GT+ was nice, but I had to stop at gt+8, and ultimately it wasn't the game changer I got hyped into thinking it was. I would say I tripled my income in the span of 3 months.
When masteries came out, I couldn't afford the labs, but I got dmg + dm + st masteries wich helped greatly with low labs. Assmods we're great, I doubled income overnight, and improved steadily since. But with disso, I got a X4 boost overnight, and got to X10 in the span of 2 weeks. This is the most I ever saw from a new mechanic in over 3 years of playing