Thanks for your thoughtful reply, and apologies for attributing this proposal to the Splinterlands team (though I suspect as CEO, your personal opinions and proposals must overlap with the team's best interests to some degree... but I digress).
The ecosystem as a whole does need new money to come in for it to be successful.
Edit: Then why not focus on attracting new players to the game? Imagine what you could accomplish if all of the time and energy spent marginalizing and taxing Wild players in the name of fighting "bot farms" was spent instead on expanding the user base!
Allowing users to continually earn rewards without needing to put more in hurts everyone and is not in the best interest of anyone who is interested in the long term success of this product.
Edit: I care about the long term success of this product, but with every new rule change that chips away at any benefit I can derive from owning old cards, I am less and less convinced that this product cares about me.
The problem for me is that as an investment-minded individual, I would have never started playing Splinterlands years ago, if I knew that it would require me to constantly pump money into new cards, while my older cards were all but guaranteed to lose value due to a Modern / Wild system that didn't exist when I made those initial card investment decisions.
I don't blame you for trying to ensure that the game economy has a constant influx of money. If I were in your shoes, I might be doing the same thing. The issue is that this goal is in direct opposition to my best interests as a rational player. I have no problem with paying thousands of dollars to build up a strong card collection, but I have a very big problem with that collection systematically being devalued so that I continuously feel pressured to buy new cards.
When I started playing this game, I (maybe naively) thought that it was possible for both Splinterlands and myself to prosper financially. But it seems that the reality is more of a zero-sum game, where in order for the Splinterlands ecosystem to prosper, the vast majority of current players must not be allowed to prosper (and this is perhaps a sobering reality of any long-running P2E game ecosystem that I have only recently begun to realize).
Simple as that!
In my opinion it doesn't help the overall game economy at all to devalue old cards. If I felt my old cards would keep/increase(!) their value, I still would consider to buy new cards, as well. However, as I observe my old cards to lose value and use cases I would be just stupid to buy new cards again (which will be 'old' sooner or later, too).