This has pretty much been standard for borderlands games since the inception, as well as looters in general. You just have to shift your perspective on the loot-- starting out you pick up everything, then past a certain point you start ignoring common drops entirely, then you can ignore tier 2, etc.

The way to look at it is that as you level your character what was formerly loot becomes garbage :)

Looks like about 100 bucks a year, and more of that was in the early days of my account when I used to get sucked into sales (which also used to have those crazy huge discounts pop up for a game that lasted 8 hours) and before I had a giant backlog.

These days I almost never buy a game unless I want to play it immediately.