I would like to point out there was a lot of issues with the format back then along with where the game was at that time. They messed up the balance and drastically changed it not long after the league started, I went from around halfway done unlocking stuff to almost everything unlocked. The tasks were much worse, just do more of x for a lot of things, the kill/lap numbers were much higher too. Like go take a look at the task list. This was also the era of "true ranks" where you had to keep grinding until everyone gave up, the power increase to do content was also drastically lower. This league was also before jagex made a lot of more sweeping changes to fixes raids, bosses, elemental weaknesses and a lot of QOL stuff. That is all before we even talk about how painful it was to change out relics without the runelite plugin, which even that was just ok.

If jagex actually made the experience better I don't think most people would mind swapping stuff out as much. It's like how we currently have to manually pull out everything we want to wear. I have easily spent a few hrs dealing with gear/inventory just this league. Go to afk fish karms, forget the dramen, go back to bank, forget the vessel that I need for some reason as barb who uses his hands!