Who said they respect their ring or medal. When did you do this survey? Can you please present your survey and its official findings. Yiu are just guessing.That's because that culture (which is a bad culture) has been instilled. Culture is "learned behaviour". If you tell people something doesn't matter, that culture will seep through. You change the culture and you change learned behaviour by changing the rules and the way medals are awarded. This works, because in other sports, where you don't need to play in the last game to get a ring/medal, the players respect their ring/medal.
If you don't change a bad culture, nothing will change.