i like a whole lot of what OP posted.
to throw my 2 cents a little.
for boss encounters, i kinda understand WHY ggg decided to not buff the gold rates. the answer is balance.
gold was introduced to curb botters and to restrict players from easily using async trade without a tax.
this forced players to play and earn gold, while settlers was a gold sink.
players have NO WAY to earn a lot of gold outside mapping/playing the game.
IF boss encounters were balanced to give more gold or equal gold to a map or 2. then the new problem would be players now having ways to get tons of gold in a short amount of time. botters would bot more efficiently.
i would imagine its more tedious for botters to run a full map than to just go in a boss arena, nuke the boss and get tons of gold and only needing to put an hour or so to get stupid amounts of gold to allow them to flip currency or whatever for the entire league.
theres no easy answer to this. but i reckon a compromise ggg could consider is to introduce a new form of gold reward. such as "gold bonds"
gold bonds are typically the same as gold except it gets deposited into kingsmarch automatically and cannot be withdrawn.
speaking of which, i think gold deposited into kingsmarch should not be able to be withdrawn in the first place. its an investment to the people in kingsmarch.
