From what I have seen, the pattern that the dev team seems to go by, is to make things significantly more time consuming.
Remember when hierlooms didn't take 100s of hours?
Remember when gold in C-rpg didn't flow out of your wallets from maintenance?
Now the same thing is happening with strategus. I do not think it is bad, but I think there is an overlying premise that the devs are trying to continue fixing...but the problem is cyclical.
Seemingly Dev ideas: "There are too many players that are the best, and no new players can join and have fun"...Solution? "Make everything much harder, so the player whom are the best are not rediculously good anymore."
I think this idea works in some cases, but we really should consider giving newer players incentives to play, without the solution being, "make veteran players/clans less scary."
There needs to be a line drawn so that everyone is at risk of losing and gaining immediate power. Instead of making power impossible to get, but absolute once obtained.
*Edit- Think of hierlooms, they are hard to get, but once you get them you have an advantage forever.
Same with money, and soon it will be same with power in strategus.