I’m not sure what you are reading into my words here, but I don’t think anything I am saying is especially controversial. Eve Online is a competitive PvP game. If you don’t give stuff for players to work together to accomplish, and work against other players, activity is going to dry up. No, endlessly grinding imaginary ore to build stuff you can’t use because everyone is perfectly safe isn’t a long-term viable game. The game is already straining under the amount of safety, and activity just keeps going down the more buffs to safety and nerfs to content-creators that are added.
Wars are being redone and unless that revamp includes new or improved ways for players to interact, that too will fail to rescue the falling activity metrics. Cancelling the AT also deleted content and will result in less people playing this game to cooperate and compete with each other to win the championship. There is no getting around that, even if you have some hope in the dubious excuse that this is to dedicate more time to “balance”. I have said some harsh things about the AT in the past, but even I recognize it was a primary motivator for some number of players to keep playing this game and think deleting it, even if for only a year, is going to be bad for player activity numbers.
But clearly there are not enough dev hours in the week to fix these and a whole collection of other problems with the game as fast as everyone would want. I hope both wars and the AT come back soon in better shape and allow players to play their game again, struggling together with and against others to achieve their goals in the sandbox. Because just cutting and removing content from this game is not going to get it growing again. It never has, and there is no reason to think it will in the future.