Absolutely! 
We’re all friends here, and your points are clear, and well-made. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to jump in and discuss!
I personally think we strike a nice balance between the two.
If our main focus was making money, we’d have implemented an energy system. Fortunately, our publisher 505 Games, are great guys who trusted us to make a game that was free of energy systems, so we could focus more on the gameplay.
All I’ve really been arguing is that reality dictates we spend equal resources on making sure that the money gets made in the safest most reliable way. For us, and many other F2P games, that is a gachapon mechanic (lucky dip, keys & chests, etc…)
I completely respect your opinion on the value of the items in our shop… but it turns out that when a F2P game looks at its playerbase, as a whole, a gachapon performs really well… especially for a game at our stage of evolution with decent mid-sized-and-growing playerbase.
The good news is that Gems isn’t in any danger of closing servers any time soon, it’s been steadily growing for 2 years with little-to-no advertising. We noticed the other day that our concurrent users on Steam alone (our smallest of the 5 playerbases, I think) was triple that of the recent AAA title Battleborn (or so I was told). So definitely not a low playerbase, but not in the millions where we’d like to be!