Seriously defending this blatant ripoff? Yeah its a way, a way to once again screw over Beta players who invested two years of their time playing and grinding the game and rightfully earned all the stuff they have.
1. CDPR decides to steal all our powder and convert it to scraps at full release,
2. then they remove ability to use the scraps to craft premiums after they asured us that won't be the case,
3. and now they are trying to screw us over from our scrap reserves so that in the end they can reduce the value of our resources earned over years of Beta testing as much as they possibly can.
Even if you had 1 million+ scraps, 4000 for 5 random cards is a blatant ripoff no matter how you look at it.
As a f2p player i don't consider it "stealing" although i can understand the frustration of players that bought powder with real money, but in either case would you rather be stuck with a couple hundred K of useless scraps?
I have about 100K scraps left after completing the entire non premium collection (including CC cards), that will yield me 125 premium cards (some will be duplicates ofcourse). I can't say i remember for sure but i doubt that i had that amount of premiums in the beta.