Increase our ability to upgrade and gamble on dropped items

TLDR: During the campaign, increase our ability to add affixes to our items. We are losing on a lot of fun because we cannot afford to gamble with the dropped loot. Also, it would save us from frustration, when we are struggling and cannot afford to improve our gear.

important information: I mostly play trade league, but I do not like buying from trade, because it seems to trivialize the gameplay -> boring. I mostly use it to sell items to get more exalter orbs, or as a last resort, if I need to buy new gear because I am struggling too much. I am happy to use it in the late game, when I want to see what my character can truly do if it has great gear.

Description of the problem:
1. When I am struggling during the campaign, I feel like I do not have the tools (currency) to improve my situation. So I end up copying someone else's optimal build -> boring and feels like I lost.
2. We are loosing on fun and excitement about dropped magic (and to lesser extend, rare) loot. I would like to bring good gear I find to camp and make it rare and slam some exalted orbs on it and hope for the best. I cannot afford that, so I just end up buying all of my stuff from vendors which is boring.
3. When you get a great rare item (find it or crafted it), after equipping it, you might miss crucial stats after removing the existing item. For example, you lose str/dex/int -> some other item becomes unusable. Or your resistances or resource generation are messed up so playing becomes difficult. I need exalted orbs to try to fix those issues!

So to replace 1 OK item with a better one, you might need like 10+ exalted orbs, because your 2 first magical items turned out bad and the third one finally worked.
So what I end up doing is, looking for rare gear from vendors and save my exalted orbs to upgrading those. BORING.

Solution suggestion
1. Give us more currency. Like 3-4 times more to solve this issue.
2. Give us an alternative way to add affixes to our gear. The rolls from these inferior methods could be lower than real exalted orbs.
2.1 NPC could agree to add an affix to an item for each (or every second) waypoint we find. The character could end up being evil and we need to fight them at the end :).
2.2 Add fractured exalted orbs (less powerful) to the game that drop only during the campaign. Perhaps in predetermined places so you can balance their effect.