I think, the purpose is to enforce more needs on the players, so that they have to spend more money and time on gathering those tools and therefore their resources being more limited. But I think it's a pretty bad way to force more management on the players.
I mean, sure, we know this concept from Diablo: identify scrolls. But in Diablo resources were endless because you could remake a map and also later on you could unlock ways to make identifying easier like finding Deckard Caine.
If they really want to keep it, they should at least turn it into indentify scrolls and not a 'glass', also those scrolls should work, without the need of having Loremaster. So you would have the choice: spend social points for loremaster or use identify scrolls. But if you learned loremaster, identifying should work automatically like suggested.
