I always respect your opinion Byz. You are an amazing player with a great track record in both the community and tournaments, but I disagree with your premise that because Gold Caps only require a +44% BCX increase to get to Max that Gold ranked play is almost as large of an investment as Diamond, let alone Champion which is another beast entirely.
I have no problem spending half the season in Gold with not even a bronze deck, and I've already hit Gold ratings only 4 days into the season. The investment gap to start getting diamond chests and diamond ranked payouts is massive compared to the investment I've put in to farm Silver/Gold.
That could change with time, but this is the reality now. This season. Even after the last update, and aftermarket accounts are going up in value, not down because of services like splintermate which make bot farming easier. The truth is, we need the push, and it won't be enough.
It's going to be delicate balance finding the place for bots where they are profitable, provide matchmaking solutions evenly across leagues, and encourage them to build their accounts rather than ship all their loot off to management accounts.
This isn't a perfect solution, and it isn't meant to be, but it is definitely a step in the right direction. The next step would be a version of Proposition 1254 by CommanderChaos or SPS staking as outlined in the whitepaper.
Separating league pools is extremely important to help shift bots throughout leagues instead of crowding them all in one MAX ROI league.
If Splinterlands solved ratings inflation and accounts were in leagues appropriate for their card levels, then yes, the incremental increase to get to Gold league cards is on par with the incremental increase to get to Max level cards.
However, because ratings inflation allows bronze level decks to get to Diamond league, that definitely distorts the cost/benefit analysis and what is required to get Diamond league chests.
That's why I keep emphasizing why ratings inflation is such a major contributor to the underlying problem.
I think that you and Bulldog make decent points about the way rating works currently is broken, but I would argue that we don't have a ratings inflation problem. There is no market cap on rating.
What we have is an issue with how much rating affects rshares, which makes rating more important than winrate, cards used (even with the GF and Alpha/Beta/Promo bonuses), and how nothing replaced the Airdrop mechanic where holding assets rewarded you with more assets.
To me, the issue is less about rating and more about building out a more complete and rshare algorithm that rewards and does not punish on many factors that would drive bots to behave more like typical players in holding assets on the account and using combined cards.
I don't think we can solve this with just messing with rating. We need something better like prop 1254.