@Busteroaf: It's never only a matter of "money making" in the immediate future, but developing and taking care of your product so that:
1. your customers are happy with it and keep playing (and paying).
2. enlarge the number of paying customers.
As far as I can see now, as a spender (not competitively but yet in the past I've used a modest amount of 200 gems per war knowing we were not aiming for nothing more than top 50 or top 100), is their actual strategy is wrong because they are assuming the psycology-addiction-mechanics will do the longevity work for them. What I see atm is a spamming of new features that makes the game even more frenetic and are not welcomed by neither old time f2p or p2p. It's clear that they want our money, but they don't even bother taking care a bit of the p2p who would (according to your thoughts) ofc deserve a sort of balance in high level competitive play and uniqueness of their prizes, instead we now have a useless non plus epic and gwar epics freely fuseable from everyone; i'm not even taking into account the cheating issues of the past.
Everyone who's been playing this game for a while is unhappy with the development, for one reason or another, except you who can (as far as i can see) empathically link your interests with the ones of the developers. How long do you think this will last? No long-term innovation, ppl gets tired, new games with similar mechanics are on the store.


I can't blame Gree for being willing to earn money, hell that's what this whole thing is made up for. But when you get your money you can do it wisely with a bit of ethic, or you can grab whatever you can until you product lasts. The difference is a long term guaranteed earning.
But specifically speaking, in this game the problem is if you want to spend gems, you have to spend tons of it, or it's not worth to. Ofc the chest mechanics can trick you into spending your first ones, and poor will ppl would keep opening like if they were in Las Vegas. Then they quit after receiving crap or getting an epic that hasn't changed anything in their gameplay (they still end up ranked 10.000-1.500 in arena, and GW depends on where you are and how much you are willing to spend).
A different strategy would be limit the amount of gems you can use to get to the top of the various parts of the game, so that everyone can be tempted to spend their little amount of gems and end up in a good position (if they are good).
The game as it is now, it's more a bank account measurement. And the f2p are here only to illude the p2p that there's a lot of ppl playing this game and you are "stronger" (cooler?) than all of them, but the fact is they could be nothing more than stupid npcs to you, for the way you interact with them.