For me, the problem is not premium. I understand and support it. The problem is that once you pay premium to read a chapter, you lose the free chapter unless you wait for the system to catch-up.
The other problem is that the quality errors I was willing to ignore when it was free/4 spirit stone become unacceptable when I am paying 10-19 spirit stones per chapter.
The current system bases the chapter price on the number of words. Will this lead to the same problem, we see with the novels themselves, of wordy fillers? Will we now see more wordy, less concise translations?
I think a flat fee monthly system would work best. It could still be tiered to target the casual, not so casual, and fast readers. I see comments that monthly will not work due to the membership size on Webnovel. That makes no sense because if that is the case then this whole premium system is even less likely to work.