I have to stop hoping the game becomes X while clearly they want the game to be Y.

That's a decision I made quite a while ago, but I still follow the discussions around Splinterlands (and still sit on quite some assets).
I can only speak for myself but for me the main condition for enjoying a game is - apart from being challenging and fun - to make sure that the BEST and most skillful players should win (and also earn most).

In Splinterlands there are two reasons why that is not the case:

• There is such a huge (inflationary) amount of (partly very expensive) cards on the market that only these players who spend a lot of money have a chance to dominate the rankings and tournaments. That has always been the case but is getting more and more extreme (of course owning certain cards should still be beneficial in many ways but in my opinion the decisive element for being successful have to be skills!).

• In the only mode (wild) where one can use all one's cards one will mainly fight against 'players' who are using any kind of software which has nothing to do with skill in the game (and most of them are not even using self-made programs).
  In my eyes a 'player' who doesn't play is a contradiction in itself.

The idea of "idle games" (passive earning) never attracted me at all. If I want to have a passive income I stake any crypto currencies and don't need a complicated game with many requirements at all.

(I personally also don't like the strategy at all to focus on the (temporary) value of new cards while neglecting old ones - these new cards will be 'old' sooner or later, too, and everybody who observes and understands that mechanism will abstain from buying new cards for exactly that reason - but that is another topic.)

Concerning the bot discussion:

Behind every single bot is a very real player ... [Yabapmatt]

A real human maybe, but not a real player.

If I let my chess software beat chess grandmasters that doesn't make me a chess player (maybe a good programmer, but in case I use the chess software of anybody else, I might not even be a programmer).

But fortunately, in every successful game software is strictly separated from human competition.