Use a max. carry weight alt. They can carry 86 junk. Load it full a few times a day till you have enough.
If you have the caps it's faster to simply buy it from other players.
There could be some player friendly changes to junk gathering, like a fixed amount of 8-10 per encounter and back to picking up 2 at a time.
But really doing it alone is damn boring, it's almost like leveling on crafting healing powders (btw now it's impossible? 0 xp?)
Crafting weak healing powders gives 3 xp per powder. So it's not impossible, it just takes ages to collect flowers and make the powder. Especially since you can only make 1 at a time.