The fact that I can gold farm up from 100 gold to 54,000+ gold without spending a dime on your game suggests that others can easily do it as well.
I made 10k in the last 2 weeks on this server alone. On a server that has been active for over a month. So yeah, it isn't hard. It is a lot easier than it once was actually. A couple years ago, like half the players were gold farmers, farming for their actual fights in other worlds. Dwindling player base though...
That said, I do not agree that there should be any monetary entry point for the game, even a soft entry point. At most money should provide a convenience that can also be earned in game. It should also be capped so someone that wants to spend thousands can't just buy their way into first place on the leader boards. Currently the leader boards are all wallet + skill = result, and they don't actually show who the best players are, but who can leverage their wallet the best or simply outspend everyone else. Oh, and cheaters of course.
From a game design perspective, no real money purchases should be in a game unless they are purely cosmetic. From a business perspective, that doesn't really work. There needs to be balance and obviously Inno has been too greedy regardless of counter arguments, because you can go look at games in beta testing using the same formula that have a larger active player base than this game does. The game is not attracting many new players, and those it does are not retained. People can argue it is because of reasons other than being pay to win, but I have played a few of these style games and a lot of other browser/app games and they all start to die when they become pay to win, without fail, regardless of how popular they were before that.
Also, as personal anecdotal evidence, I used to pay every time I started playing a new world in this game, until they made too many changes and turned it into a wallet driven game. So they stopped getting money from me. Seems Scot likely had a similar experience. It is not that we dislike the game, it is we dislike the direction it took and will not financially support it in it's current form.