Feel free to start selling the lower tiers you find once the components aren't relevant for you though. The exchange rate for refining them up is pretty abysmal and even commons can be worth a chunk of change if you need a boost there. Right now I'm selling anything under t4. You will eventually get tight on cash for various reasons unless you are ignoring cyberware stat rerolling etc.
Yeah, just going from T4+ to T5++ would require 196875 tier 1 components (for a single iconic weapon) and you get, what, 5 per gun. It works much better with quickhack components since there are only four tiers of components and someone realized that higher tier hacks should cost less (T2=35 components, T3=30, T4=25, T5=12). During a very hard (faster leveling) playthrough I managed to craft 4 T5 quickhacks at the moment I got a T5 deck.
One solution would be allowing higher tier junk that would level like the rest of the stuff, another would be changing the ratio of lower tier components needed for higher tier to something more reasonable like 3:1. Then you'd need 81 T1 components for one T5 instead of the current 625.
The 5:1 ratio is also inconsistent with selling prices; you get 21 eddies per T1 component if you craft and sell T1 Copperheads, which goes down tier by tier all the way to 0.25 eddies per T1 component if you upgrade them to T5 and craft T5 Copperheads. I don't see any reason why there should be an almost 100-fold loss if you want to avoid tedium. It doesn't really matter in the end, because you can make money very easily now, more like someone just didn't do the math.
e. clarification
