Maybe you're doing it wrong? I had no trouble getting a tier 4 altar up and running fairly quickly. I started putting all of my efforts into Runes of Self Sacrifice early on, so that by the time I was able to make a Well of Suffering I was able to dump 1000 LP into the altar per heart. Then, as it was easy as hell to make things at this point, I swapped all of the self sacrifice runes for Runes of Sacrifice and installed a huge Cursed-Earth mob spawner down below. I literally could not run out of blood without spamming 1 million LP rituals.
Next time around I'm planning to stick with a purely self-sacrifice altar. I found the Well of Suffering/ big mob grinder setup a bit overpowered in the end and I want to keep it a bit of a challenge. The mod definitely didn't feel grindy to me by any means, it's all about finding systems that allow you to put more blood into it faster.
It's the tier 2>3 progression I can never do, you need 25k LP but can only store 10k LP, and you need the tier 3 orb for nearly all the non-standard runes. I had a cursed earth mob grinder and I could never get enough LP out of it because the mobs never dropped down into the hole.