Deathifier don't listen to these people. I don't think any of them are thinking things through to their correct conclusions...
Perhaps, maybe there is hope for you Mac though since you managed to think along these lines but how come your conclusion was so different to mine?
If devs are doing what I think they are doing I don't think it's a bug or accident or lack of testing etc. Nothing is "wrong" or needs fixing it's just a case of player misconceptions as far as I can tell.
Ok, going back again and looking at what Deathifier wrote, as opposed to going off my memory..
Dear Entropia Universe Community,
In Planet Calypso update 2013.1 and/or update 2013.1.1 a number of changes were made to Treasure Island.
These changes were not requested by me, were done without my input, and were deployed without notifying me.
After becoming aware of and examining the changes I have determined that they are likely to negatively affect visitors to Treasure Island and I would like to make the community aware of the issues in an effort to minimise their impact until they are addressed.
Planet Calypso’s developers were asked to explain why the changes were made on the 30th of April 2013 and I will update this announcement when I receive an explanation.
I didn't come to a completely different conclusion than you, I agree with some of what you wrote, but not all of it. I was kind of mixing up two separate but similar things in the same post and that part was wrong, but I was trying to describe the change control process for those who might not understand that its a formal process that is supposed to prevent these kinds of things from happening. Its clear that the change was a result of a release, not someone mucking around in production outside of a release as I was wondering about, so you can ignore that part if you like because it was most likely not the case, but that production access control is still a part of the over all change control process, so I'll just leave that in there.
Since those changes don't seem to make any sense in the overall context, and seem to be an incremental change, they were most likely the result of planned future changes. So, in that case I would say you are correct its not a "bug", but whether those changes were supposed to be in THIS release, or ANOTHER release is the question in my mind.
I don't agree with you that "nothing is 'wrong' or needs fixing". I would say it IS wrong, and should be fixed and put back the way it was until its all ready to go, or what is more likely the case, put in with the rest of the changes that are planned so it makes sense. It's usually easier to just go forward than roll back so I would expect they are going to wait until they are ready with the next release to "fix" it. But hey, bullets aren't being fired so they are loosing money so I would think they would hot patch it or something!
I get that the game developers may most likely have some future changes in mind. I don't get why they would make incremental changes toward that goal since it does not make any sense, which is why its a non sequitur for most observers. Either they did it on purpose, and didn't think the changes would matter to anyone, or didn't care, which means they are being apathetic to the land owners and players which in my opinion is bad, as they seem to be in many cases, which is why its so frustrating for people to deal with.
Or, someone was making those changes for a future release, and somehow that code got incorporated into the production release before it was ready to go, so now you have a partial change that was meant to be in a later release, which would have made more sense for the "users" when they encountered it at that point. I've seen that happen before. In any case, it should have, could have been caught in testing, and if not could be a problem with testing, or they should/would have caught it when they were reviewing the release, prior to the release which means there's a problem in the code review process, if they even have one.
Also, it brings up the process in my mind that for people that are invested heavily in the game in something like a land area, they should be brought into the process somehow before things are changed. They may not be given the opportunity to do anything about it, but at least they could be made aware that things are changing, but those changes shouldn't affect the players or the LAs ability to produce the income it currently was producing.
I guess the scenario where they are given access to a test instance to look at it before, could be a problem because if they don't like it, and think its a negative, and could not provide input or feedback to have it changed to their liking, they could sell it ahead of the change and leave the buyer holding the bag and that would be a problem.
I guess time will tell. In any case, as a former LA owner, I would be pissed if it were happening to me, and I'm not all that happy that its happening to him, or anyone else for that matter. You could say, well lookey what he got when they roll all that out and its all wonderful and makes him a ton of peds, but that still doesn't "fix" the ongoing communication issues.
anyway, sorry I'm bored at work, blah blah bah...
tldr; In my mind, if they planned it, or didn't plan it, its a problem, one that needs to be fixed, so we differ in our opinion there.
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Are they really that resource constrained? Or, since this is a different kind of company/product and its really that hard to manage? My experience is with very complex enterprise business systems, I don't have any experience with a single product company like this, so I really don't have experience in this type of environment to say, but again I can only think, is it really this hard? In my experience I would say no its not, and that's the frustration for many of us who watch it go on like this year after year. 
