I also love that players are rewarded by daring to walk off the beaten path (aka sparkly gold trail) and explore the area. It's fun finding treasure chests and resource nodes tucked away in corners. PUG groups too often get the 'rush rush rush' mentality which personally I could do without. I'd much rather take the few…
Not being able to discard lockboxes must be a bug, and I will be logging it as such the next time I am in game. If it is working as intended, then I am very disappointed in Cryptic/PWE and I believe this will have a very serious negative impact on their game.