That’s a lot of IF and Maybe chances And have to be at nemesis with undead Just to fit in with your “trivial” farming :rolleyes:
So what does everyone that isn’t in this one specific situation supposed to do then to make this ever so trivial as you claim ?
The dungeons themselves is what should make them feel special, not some key requirement to open a door.
I understand some of you like this and that okay. What is “likable or fun” is highly subjective, there’s no wrong or right in it.
There’s no need to exaggerate though, I don’t think most people that feel the key are an annoying requirement want to have legendaries handed to them on a silver platter so there no need to try and make it out like that.
I personally play these games for fun and for me that doesn’t include wasting my time, cause my time is limited and valuable, trying to farm stuff so I can make a key so I can then run what I wanted to do in the first place in the short playtime I have.
Which is why I said I was okay if this didn’t change because it’s obvious a % of people like this mechanic and for those of us that do not well CE isn’t hard to use and it’s easy to give yourself a stack of 999 keys as long as you have 2 or 3 to start with.
Not lucky at all. Those were accumulated through several characters. I didn’t use Ectoplasm that much and it piled up. However I didn’t deem it necessary to pop in every dungeon on every difficulty with all of them. Skipping the first 2 difficulties of dungeoneering was apparently enough to start the piles growing in a way that can’t be exhausted easily.
This is now however, as I was beginning to play GD I did go in them, on all difficulties, but I didn’t know better that is not really worth the time. But even back then it was the Bloods that were the precious materials not the Ectoplasm.
There is one other thing that made it possible to acquire or at least keep materials. At one point I noticed that legendary drop rate isn’t all that high in the dungeons. SoT for example - 1 you get from the murder room on the first floor, and if lucky another one. On the second floor there are the chests after Alkamos and if lucky you get another one. So many times I just end up with the minimal 2 legendaries. And in terms of time spend I thought it’s bordering inefficient. So a faster way to acquire those is just portal around the map to bosses with names in purple and high level and ignore the trash on the way.
Eventually the dungeons became just zones to test how strong my char is. Not a farming zone unless in a party for speed clearing. Which if you haven’t tried you definitely should. Not only for the drops. It’s another experience. 
You also said that you found 4 ectoplasms as if you spent the previous ones with your previous character? If you were to keep going in the dungeons on all difficulties and spending on shrines and crafting and putting it on gear you will be lacking it at some point. But if the intention of the devs were to always be able to have enough without choosing your expenses, they’d just put an option in your char window to apply whatever component you want infinite times, like when you change the color of an item in D3.
However it seems that you are only a few chars in GD. The problem you are having will most probably fix itself after a while even if you continue doing all of the dungeons.
Just you wait when you realize you have to craft several Haunted steel and you don’t have enough Vengeful Wraith. Hoho, fun times. 