A very long time ago I made a post in similar style to yours. I identified an issue whereby you could bot, and create new accounts, and get an incredible amount of rewards for zero effort, other than moving cards around.
That introduced the card cooldown as a result of my protests and calculations as to how quickly someone could've drained the booster packs (which were rewards) from the pool, which was meant to fund tournament prize pools.
Having left splinterlands for sometime, and coming back, as a (human) player now - it feels more coherent, and I think untamed has added new "shiny" to the game, but I do feel that with time, this, too, will stagnate.
I agree that there needs to be a push for more players from outside the cryptosphere to come and start playing this game. The marketing basis and proposition on the game's homepage is 100% about it being on blockchian.
It needs to stand on its own feet as a game, and get a following on those merits. How the spells, lands, and other elements may change the balance of the game is yet to be seen, but I agree with your premise that when its more profitable to engage a bot, or cloud services to play for you, than simply the joy of playing, that's not a game - and it reflects the same principles that many have taken the steem blockchain towards - a principle of "how much value can I extract with the minimum amount of effort?"
Having said that, I would hate to think how less valuable STEEM would be as a whole without this game.
I don't care about steem, and I bot. But I'm also a human player and I see this game about to die. No one wants to pay money to farm and grind just to be able to play a longer game just to make less money. We need new blood and this is just a money grab. If they did something to help bring in new blood I'd support it.
I just really wish the game had some PvE aspect that didn't give rewards - (boss fights?) - I really did like your idea about reward cards being exclusive to a season, the same way games like overwatch and league of legends have something only available short term.
New blood will only come when there's a compelling reason to play the game regularly.
The nature of a blockchain and a procedural system that the game is based on (ie not real time) - means that bots can likely be developed for any permutation or modification of game rules.
That's been the case right from the very start.
Yes, I said above we should have done p vs e not farming... I mean what are they thinking? We would all love p vs e.
I love the idea of the seasonal reward cards too, but so far that has been frowned upon and I do not understand why.