I figured they were a mechanic to reward people that spent time actually playing the game, but all it rewards is people AFKing. As BMJ said, Nature/Ind is the only slider that does anything. And so the serious players have two characters, one for farming and one for mining.
The trad/change slider does make it slightly harder to feed curios to alts, as you want to get them to full change, so you can't just spawn them and thats that.