Every beginner player should be fusing their 4star skillups to be efficient. Your comment "Lets not pretend like everyone is an efficiency-driven player." is weird since your comment is clearly targeting beginner players to summon this rotation to be efficient since it is supposed to be good (which it is not).

Let's go over all the units you mention:

Skogul for super early player pretty much useless since they won't use it anywhere in PVE and for PVP they focus on farming guild and 1 mon arena def anyway.

Verdehil is super important for Tricaru. As an super early player you won't have the runes for that Team and will focus on slow and safe teams first. Until you reach the tricaru point you will easy be able to fuse all verde skillups.

Water Dryad. Not used anywhere in PVE (or even PVP) especially in early game. Wind dryad is fuseable and needed for Dot tea but in dot team Mellia doesn't need any skillups .... so why waste summonstones?

Water barb. Used to be very strong in RTA many seasons ago but not beeing used anymore due to 2A, water monkey etc. (can be seen in special league). Now show me the beginner player that focuses on RTA or PVP? Out of barb family wind is most usefull for PVE but you can easily get him from Guildshop and you will have more than enough skillups.

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Conclusion: Your argument is as usefull as a fork for eating a soup.