I agree with this part of your post. There have always been built in bottlenecks & governors to keep us from moving too quickly.
I half agree with this. Yes, BB seems to be offering more “merchandise” for purchase with gems than ever before.
However, I don't see it as a disbanding of restraint when put in context of recent changes in the game, mostly in the form of events. We used to have 3 events a year, with the Soccer event every other year, and the rare Anniversary event as extras.
Now we have the traditional 3 we've always had, plus: Valentines, Yearly Soccer, Yearly Anniversary. So the amount of events has doubled. Which means the number of Generals, Scouts and Geologists we can acquire has increased, which would indicate a need to be able to produce books faster and easier than before.
Book production clearly already wasn't working well when we only had 3 events, and so with 6 events a year and the huge increase in available characters needing books…. Had nothing about producing books improved, the complaining and gnashing of teeth would have shaken the very sky.
As far as the events themselves, there has been a steady complaint about the number of event resources needed to be able to purchase everything a person would want. BB has partially addressed this by adding explorers that have muliple loot slots, the newest of which only has multiple slots doing short and medium searches, which generally yield the best results during events anyways.
As someone who used gems to purchase all 10 Savage Scouts early in my gameplay and have then gotten every scout available from events, the addition of the newer scouts allows me to keep up with the cost changes in events that have occurred. For newer players, the new scouts with multiple slots is a way for them to be able to get a good amount of event currency even tho they don't have the large contingent of scouts long time players have.
As far as being able to get multiple CoA generals. How is that a bad thing? I can either wait for Vargus or Anslem to walk back from an attack and send him again OR use him on the camps where he saves the most troops while sending other gens that take higher losses to keep the adventure moving. So now, I can lower my losses if I'm willling to spend some gems.
If your main concern is people being able to level up faster…. Leveling doesn't get you anything once you pass a certain point, so is, in itself, pretty pointless. As far as bottlenecks and governors to slow things down some: Crystals, Adventure Tales, Obsidian, Tokens & OilSeed all have limits on how many can be acquired. There are probably other things I'm not thinking of at the moment.
Actually, we don't know for certain what is being developed as far as adventures go. The Split City Co-ops could be a glimpse of what may be coming later as far as harder adventures needing powerful generals. There's some long term quest in development on test right now, not sure what the adventures are going to be like on that either.
Maybe you're right and BB is just trying to grab as much cash as they can before this all shuts down one day. I think it's somewhere more in the middle. If they can continue to make money off the game, why would they shut down? If they attempt to generate more income and everybody pooh-poohs it cause it's no longer a free game, yadda yadda yadda, then it's probably going away sooner than people who've spent money would like it to.