Originally posted by The Mighty Koi:

Just checking if it's possible to manually override rarity requirements for runes, and if possible to remove ethereal runes either manually or request a config option.

I'm playing stars above but the early game gear requires mid-late game runes because of the allocated rarities.

(eg. Aegis Driver requires an eerie(?) rune to apply levelling.)

Ethereal Runes were implemented with the precise purpose of allowing players to manually override rarity requirements, since they can be crafted at any point in the game and can be applied regardless of rarity.
In retrospect I probably could've implemented rarity-overriding as a config, but at the time of implementation Ethereal Runes were the first thing I thought of and seemed more straightforward to implement in the code and use in-game.

no sweat, all's good. thank you for your response though! :)