Prayers to saints are prayers to God. It is by His power that they are saints and work miracles. If God did not want you to venerate them, He would not grant them a single miracle.
However, it is possible to pray wrongly. It is possible to pray wrongly to God directly; it is possible to pray to a saint wrongly. If, in the hypothetical example that you offer, a prayer to a saint is a diversion, then one should not pray that and find a better way to pray.
Christ gave us an example of that. When a woman in the crowd cried out “blessed is the womb that bore You and the paps that gave You suck”, her veneration of Mary was sincere but a bit imprecise. It was stressing physiological motherhood. But Jesus wanted us to venerate all saints rather than His mother alone, and He wanted us to venerate them for reasons of their obedience to Him. So He corrected the woman: “Yes, rather blessed are these who hear the Word and keep it” (Luke 11).
Yeah...you and your heretic cult need to repent and embrace the true and living God!