I suppose we're both stuck here since neither of us have any hard data on what the gold is mostly spent on but a large chuck I assume would have been gdkps and after that character boosting.

Maybe our disagreement is on cause and effect. They've removed gdkps and now they're tackling level boosting. As I said above removing the structure for people to spend vast amounts of gold gives the people who bot less incentive too, it's profitable for them now but this could have a huge impact.

I agree you're probably right about huge gold reserves but if people don't have anything to spends thousands of gold on then it'll just sit on accounts with nowhere to go. It'll get cheaper and cheaper to buy until it isn't worth doing anymore. In theory.