You’ve done a good job summarizing this, but missed something I consider important.
Along with the introduction of expertise, the existing system to give increases to watermark, particularly through chests, is being nerfed heavily. I should mention you can craft up to 7 casts per day, one of each color, but only one for any particular slot.
This is the problem, as I see it. When I first saw the announcement of this system, without all the details, I thought as an adjunct to the existing system, gypsum was going to be a cool way to have some influence over the watermark. Instead, they have added a f2p mobile game with all these different currencies and time gates. Not only can you only make one cast per day of a given color, materials of that color will no longer drop after you get enough. Oh and casts (and the orbs needed to craft them) cost gold to make…a lot of it.
I have often pointed out in the past when dev teams in mmos didn’t understand player psychology. That’s the case here, where effectively players will stop getting rewards for their favorite activity after a time. Dictating that a player must engage in diverse activities to get rewards is a mistake. Moreover, players will interpret this (loss of rewards) as punishment. It would have been better to incentivize players for diversifying in some way if that was the desired behavior.
I’ve spent a lot of time defending this game. I have over 400 hours in it. There’s no defending this.