@Pasa: Very happy to discuss this stuff with you. Game Design & Production Education is something I do a number of times a year at universities/colleges. Helping players understand what is happening and why is a really useful thing for everybody.
Essay incoming. TL;DR Sometimes you gotta break eggs to make an omelette.
So… I’ve got a little bit of experience working with game design (about 3 decades now), and while I freely admit there is plenty of stuff I don’t know or I get wrong, there is a PROCESS we follow which more often than not leads to good outcomes for everybody - core players, casual players, the dev team, & our publisher. This process or something very similar, is in place at many great dev studios, such as Riot Games, and Blizzard. But it scales down nicely to small teams like ours too.
The core of it goes like this: good design needs to be built on 3 PILLARS - player feedback, designer intuition/experience, and hard statistics/analytics. Each of those pillars is of equal value. As soon as you lean on one too hard, you get problems… and that’s kind of what you’re implying in your post, but it’s not the case here.
Lean on analytics too hard? You get the strip-mining you mentioned.
Lean on designer feedback too hard? You add features that lose your core audience, and don’t work with your business model.
Lean on player feedback too hard? You skew the game features to cater to the most vocal players,and you either go broke by giving too much away, or alter the difficulty to cater for a minority.
With these recent changes:
- Analytics tell us that our economy is not healthy (too much reward being given too freely, which messes with the patterns of play and core loops)
- The Design team on both player/publisher sides, who play the game constantly on live accounts, agree for a number of reasons,based on their experience both mechanically and emotionally with the game.
So, we KNEW going live with 1.0.8 that some players wouldn’t like changes, especially changes that reduced Gems from Tributes and Souls from Arena, but in this case a combination of analytics & design experience tell us that the best course of action is what we did. If the design team had not agreed, it would never have been changed. So far everything points to the fact that it was the correct decision. And of course we will tweak/adjust stuff to improve it as time goes on.
Our goal is to have Gems of War be very successful for many years. And we’re in a much better place than we were 12 months ago (we even just made a top 10 games of 2015 list on Kotaku Fahey's Top 10 Games Of 2015 
).
Now you may disagree with the above - that’s fine - but let me challenge a core-player belief as an example. I’ll quote from one of your posts:
How much time the tres hunt is out and dead in the water for majority of players? How many changes THAT thing got since release?
Now, it IS often mentioned by players on the forums that Treasure is a waste of time.
However, the reality is that Treasure Hunt is hugely popular amongst the vast majority of our player-base under level 100, which is over 90% of active players. Treasure Maps are purchased with Glory and consumed at a very high rate.
We gave away 100 packs which included a couple of Treasure Maps on the weekend. Most of those treasure maps were used within the hour. So, definitely NOT dead in the water for the majority of players.
Does that mean we WON’T improve the Treasure Hunt game? No! We have some improvements we’d like to make, sure. But players are already engaging with the game so well, that other things take priority.
The point of this? If you only see things from a core player’s perspective, then you’re only working with part of the picture. We love the feedback provided in this and other threads, we don’t even mind when it gets a bit passionate 
We read it ALL. And where our designers and/or our analytics agree, you will see change in the game. So keep on telling us what you like and don’t like. But understand that sometimes we will make decisions in the best long-term interests of the game that you might disagree with.