Am I the only schmuck that's not dexless?

especially when that meso could buy you gear that'll do more for you.

In 2007 (when Zenkat reset his base dex) the mesos couldn't buy gear that'd do more - if your base dex was high, the only way to get more STR was to reset base dex. Remember, the only armor for str scrolls that existed back then were cape str - so you had really nice clean items, and scrolled your weapon/glove for attack, cape for str, and that's about it. Once those 3 items had a good amount of atk/str, there's nothing left to upgrade - except reducing your base dex, while upgrading your equipment dex. It costs a lot, but is it better than 15-20 hour per level grind? Or even reaching into the 80-100 hours per level for the top players? That only gives you 5 AP too.

Right up until potential came out, it was fairly easy to be in a position where resetting base dex was the most cost efficient upgrade - it's not actually that difficult to be at an equipment tier where 3100 NX per 1 STR is not expensive. My Paladin's been there in late 2007 - after the release of topwear str scrolls. Got myself a 20 str top, and once again every possible upgrade was more expensive than ap resets (on the order of 60-80 mil per str - at the time, worth more than 3100 nx)

Even with potential - you're paying 1200 NX per cube. 3% str (on my Paladin) is worth the same as roughly 22 base dex, and the better %str is, the lower that gets: Once you're at a tier where 60 cubes are unlikely to give you that 3% str upgrade, it's back to resetting base dex as the most cost effective upgrade.