Crowning is totally broken. It's a totally mindless zero risk activity. You stand in front of the altar and press '_'. That's pretty much it. The really weird thing is that adom usually tries to discourage grinding (kpl system, decreased experience with more kills, monster type scaling, etc), but this is about the most grindy activity imaginable. It's actually more boring than just grinding for exp/items, because at least there you don't just stay in the same spot pressing the same button over and over.
Some people say there should be a special quest or something, but that's a pie in the sky idea that is years off if it ever gets put in. Instead, I suggest this:
greatly reduce the piety from live saccing and greatly increase the piety from items that are sacced. Force the player to actually have to give up something of value to get something good here. Make artifacts give a ton of piety.
Second, don't tie pre/post crowning to level or number of artifacts. Just make the price appropriate for the reward. If you have to sac really good items to be crowned once, then you have to sac *really really* good items to be crowned the next time. That way there is a natural and rational restriction on how many times you can crown. You can do the weird 'don't crown a second time until level 11' or you could have a much more rational system where you say, okay, I'm only going to let adamantium and better tier items be sacced the second time around. No < level 11 player is going to have a lot of adamantium stuff anyway, and this way you don't have weird level restrictions on things.
Point is: if you are resourceful enough to figure out a way to meet the criteria, who cares what your level is. Encourage smart play, not grinding three more levels, which is just boring (and requires pretty much zero risk/spending of resources).
Monster generation is kind of tied to this. Right now you need heavy respawning for crown grinding. Instead, populate the level normally once the first time it is entered, then decrease monster generation rates greatly. You have to wade through a ton of weak enemies every time you backtrack through an area right now. What's the point? It's just annoying. There are enough optional dungeons now that no one should need the regenerating bad guys to get an item, and if crowning is changed like I'm talking about they won't be needed for that either.