The 100% tt will never work. We as a community are the most adverse a dev could have. And I don't mean that in an emotional way, but in a rational way. We will actively test, measure, scratch, experiment and abuse everything that has a number, equation or anything rationally replicable within it. It IS about money, first.
Newer players don't have this image of old style weapons (circa 2005) showing only attacks per minute and maximum damage and MA saying on loot "it's dynamic".
Decay, dmg/pec, maps, wiki, all the freaking knowledge there is out there comes from us, mostly in the quest for profit.
If there would be 100% tt, we as a group would withdraw the hell out of it before MA could say "hold on". It is in the ore concept and if you want a fluffy game of unicorns and rainbows go play wow or something. EU is a huge pvp game in which somebody must lose/deposit (in the good case temporarly, as an investment) for somebody to win/withdraw.
About messi, if there is a relevance, I doubt he deposited more than some 30k bucks, in the sense of initial costs to acquire gear and such. Most people don't understand the sheer importance of bankroll and how gamechanging can be to have that extra 5k ped on you card. 1k$ is a few magnitudes more than 10x100$ in EU.
For Smilgs, the guy is not a charity. Keep that in mind together with a shovel of salt every time you read his statistics.
I fully agree with what Joda said on various cost to play areas. I have quite a few friends who reached uber lvls simply because they play for a long time, but they can't hold their ground at the turnover of weapons at said levels. I would argue this is the biggest segment of failure ingame, the turnover starts to get punishing at lvl50-60 even with totally acceptable % like 95-98, and at lvl 100 it can be insane for anyone not familiarised with EU. There has to be more diversity from this pov, separate a bit skill progression from turnover progression as an alternative.
As for fun and such, to each its own. To me the objectives stated by Abomb sound ridiculous and I never aimed to be big and strong and kill this huge mob solo. As such I have a grand total of two iron chains finished to this day, because it always sounded like a trap to me. My biggest tick is when I do something and I see the method/commercial objective I had in mind is viable and can work. Skillwise I am fine where I am (60ish or smth), with cheap equipment I can be safe in 95% of the universe and I am free to do things and try. That as personal development.
For game objective and economy, I feel the actual mechanism of the game is missing continuously revolving resources which to have a more or less stable demand. Output components and Mtokens are the best examples I can come up with of good practices. We need more of that, tt output is the finest it has been as far as I can remember, maybe a bit too low on the swirl frequency but can't really comment without solid data. If you're unhappy with 90ish, you should have witnessed the SGA period (and even 1 year or so before), where a day of hunting or mining was entirely possible to serve you some 40-50%. Under the glory of those 10k-20k atroxes there was alot of pain, so to say.