Also, I find this ridiculous and a symptom of bad pacing, but most "competitive" people seem to prefer to skip it entirely : takes only a few minutes with the help of a high level player.

EDIT : as an example, the current «season» (where you restart the whole accumulation game from scratch across all season characters) added an «altar» where you can sacrifice random items to get season-wide character boosts. I though I was going crazy not finding the altar at the described & screenshotted location... it's because it's NOT available in story mode – only in the adventure-(the whole world starts open to you)-mode ! Nobody even thought to point that out : not in the (quite long) official season description, not in the guides that players made !!