As Awryan said in the updated OP, it’s kind of ludicrous to think this way. I believe very few people considered the recent changes deeply. My personnal view is that right now everyone is “pressured” to get more engaged in earning gold/trophies by doing more PVP and Arena.
We can’t acquire Ingots outside PVP or Arena. And in explore the Hero Talent XP is halved, or you can consider that PVP/Arena is doubled but anyway, there is very little reason to play Explore except for the very specific end of traiting a troop to be used in a team.
Sure, it’s faster to do explore in general so you could get Talent XP faster, but the loss in speed is completely irrelevant when you are pilling up Glory, Gold and Ingots over and over. Top endgame dedicated players already farmed a lot of gold and glory before, but now everyone who has some decent teams can and should focus more on the highest payrolls on PVP.
So, if we assume the devs already knew this would happen the upcoming changes are probably inevitable, it doesn’t matter how well Awryan and his guildies are doing¹, the devs are aware that at least a few thousands of players will also get much more gold than they did before.
If we assume they didn’t thought about it in the first place… well i won’t comment about it… but it’s not Awryan’s guildies fault in the first place IF the devs didn’t planned/sorted some pretty obvious things.
¹ By the way, congrats to you and all your coordinated efforts with your guild Awryan.