When you thought about it, it was actually quite simple. Putting aside this newly introduced use of Worldly Essence to empower Divine items, assuming that one was only factoring in its basic usage of increasing levels, Worldly Essence would still not be enough.
Sure, one could enter Essence Instances freely, grinding them a hundred times per day as long as you found a way to speedrun them.
However, first of all, only localized Essence instances had the benefit of giving Worldly Essence at a fixed rate, and that only lasted during the 20-year grace period. After that, one would either use localized Essence instances of various races to excavate strong items from their history or 'public' Essence instances copied from known areas of the Chaos Realm to practice ahead of time.
