I think this post is mostly about flippening, and you could just rewrite it same way for splinterlands and buying packs. Generally it's weird to build opinion about game from flippening aspect. Also when talking about this it's worth to add something about DEC/SIM & flippening, I think when games are aging flippening completely depends from game currencies.
You just described short term flippening on release which is... short term. How long you can flip PS4 after release before everyone will have it and it will be not profitable. lol
Were you playing splinterlands 2 years ago? Would be same age like dcity now. That's about "better example" argument heh. And "value" of the game going down and up mostly depends from updates and new stuff. Same for both. Can you imagine Splinterlands still only with alpha and beta cards, even with approach 100% for us and price manipulation to keep it worth for players would be extremely hard to keep value at right level :D
Anyway completely different games, dcity is meant to be mathematical idle game with minimal waste of time and increasing decentralization over time, and in splinterlands you just use your time to earn. Actually there is large % of splinterlands card owners that play splinterlands same way dcity is meant to be played. Build account(people mastering it already with multiple low level accounts with low deck value for max roi) and leave it for bot, in dcity there is just very small difference in wasted time when botting, so very few people do so. Long run it's splinterlands changing towards dcity idle gameplay. There are botting services, you just need to do math like in dcity, compose deck, and leave it. Not even comparing incoming land update to dcity...