Why no Orb of Alteration?

I am playing SSF and its nearly impossible to craft something useful early on. I do slam some transmutes, maybe augment stuff, but most of the time its trash. Alterations would help a lot in early acts.

Alchemy Orb seems to be the new Divine Orb, i droped maybe 10 in 100 hours playtime. And most of the time the result is also trash.

Butt I really like the higher drop rate for exalts and the way they changed chaos orbs.

The reason is they wanted bases drops and blues to matter more early on. With alt spam you can just have one base and spam until you hit what your after. The new system forces you to consider all relevant drops and hunt for more relevant mods.

That being said, I think that it wouldn't hurt to add a "remove a random mod, add a random mod to a magic item" style item like chaos orbs, and if they still wanted to keep the same attrition of loot bricking, just make it so they have a small chance to destroy/corrupt the item or similar.