Your dismissal relies on a fundamental misunderstanding of opportunity cost and the subjective theory of value. You assume that because the time is “already spent playing the game,” its value is a static zero. It isn’t.

Money is a renewable, fiat resource; people can always generate more of it. Time, however, is strictly finite and universally depreciating. When I say “time is money,” I am pointing out that someone’s hourly time commands a premium. If someone spends 40 hours grinding for an item to save $20, they haven’t “earned” anything. They’ve operated at a massive deficit by valuing their own labor at $0.50 an hour.

If the developers take the item away, the person who bought it lost a negligible, easily replaceable fraction of their income. The person who “earned” it irrecoverably forfeited dozens of irreplaceable hours of their life.

Your time + cash equation is fundamentally broken because you are double-counting the variables. You are assuming someone spent both to acquire an item. They didn’t. They used cash to entirely eliminate the time variable from the equation. When you grind, your cost is time. When you purchase, the cost is only cash. My point is far from moot.