As in OP's case, but I have seen a definite change in the market since the last patch. It went from offering mostly white equipment with a few green and and a gold or two every now and then, to mostly all greens with no whites. I haven't seen a piece of white equipment since the patch. This is good because I never bought those anyway, but as far as the market changing, there does seem to have been some sort of change that wasn't in patch notes.
Legendaries? *shrugs* I hardly ever got to buy those anyway, but haven't seen since that last patch, either, but never saw many. Most of my equips are gold, tho, some from events. Never bought any purple ones because the ones that did show up were for kobans, like someone else said in an earlier post. For that matter, most of the golds were, too, LOL! So if I have a purple, it's either from getting lucky with great pachinko or as a mission/contest prizes from a while back. I only have a couple, so... yeah, I don't know if anything has/will change from that. Last purples I got were at level 116 and 155. I'm now 186. If something purple did show up in the market for cash, probably would've bought it, but it didn't, or maybe just missed it or something for kobans... But only ever saw for kobans (or maybe just missed for cash, dunno), and now since no more equips for kobans, drop rate probably lowered more, lol! But at least now gold are for cash only, so maybe easier to get 1 stat gold stuff, if it shows up in shop.
I had two legendaries at the same time recently, one for my main stat, one pure crit I think. Can't complain here. It's all kinda irrelevant until we get to level 400 anyway (assuming we get a proper combat system one day), but at least legendaries last quite a few levels before being outclassed by epics.
It definitely matters - you will need weeks (if not months) of buying commons to get a single affection level.