Oh, and furthermore, if there was gold to be had from arena points (think 1 point = 1g), your standard 2000 rated player could make around 900-1000g per week without having to deal with random point buyers or split the income with teammates...think they'd still be selling their points?

I think there may be situations where the shards would be worth more than the cost of the armor/weapon purchase price. buy/shard, buy/shard mo' money, mo' money. They'd have to find some way around that if they let you vendor/shard PvP gear.

Maybe have the gear stay the say but use the glyph/enchant system. You get the gear at X honor or tokens and at 1850 ranking you can buy a glyph/enchant. Then when you get your S4 gear, you can vendor/shard to make a little money back.

On my server its about 70s for 1 point

The big reason you can get more gold out of PvE than PvP is simple. PvP requires almost no gold to spend to do, save enchants and gems. PvE on the other hand requires repair bills and consumables. I've eazily spent 100g for 1 night of raiding, and on the flip side, never spent 1g on PvPing in 2 weeks time.

Those are extremes, but you get my point. The cost of PvE is far far far higher than PvP. Thus, PvE should have gold and a higher amount of shards to compensate for that fact.