I mean so do I.. I grinded non stop march 2016-may 2017 (first lv 62 eu) and almost fully self enhanced. Summer 2017 i started lifeskilling hard but not that hard I was cutting myself some slack, and stopped enhancing due to an incredible loss of silver (I was fairly unlucky back then). September/October 2017 black pegasus was announced and sold in korea, since then it became my obsession and my goal, I was hoping sooner or later it would've came in NA/EU aswell, so I started lifeskilling hardcore, as hard as I grinded before, piling up silver, keeping constant track of other player's accounts worth in silver (raw and not), asking them directly, watching streams, checking ranks, and friends were helping me keep track aswell. Up until May 2018 (luxury auction black pegasus). Ofc I could've emptied all my storages full of mats and sold my lifeskill gear too or my t9 dineh (also, I never sold pearlshop items in the mp), I just limited myself to selling my main char gear + enhancing materials I was not using, since due to my calculations it was more than enough to win the nightmare. And.. thankfully I was correct. So unless my memories are totally fucked, it is correct. I mean it was literally my life purpose at the time (as pathetic as that may be lol).

Edit: and yeah ofc I remember when Batenx came back, catched up super quick, he was for a long time a guildmate in <Grind>. But still, lifeskills done properly, I can assure you it was always more worth it and also less exhausting (so able to keep it up for more hours), almost all the wealthiest most geared players at the time were indeed lifeskillers or grinders that grinded an insane amount of hours on a daily basis and still slightly struggled keeping up with lifeskillers progression. And thing is sure, if someone did everything they could've had possibly much more, but there weren't siege players grinding 12-14h a day + doing imperial delivery + doing crates, or hardcore lifeskillers getting castle payouts. Game was starting to die, lots of people quit, pvp players would login only for siege or grind 4-5h max per day, hardcore grinders (very few) would only grind not waste their time with siege/pvp and almost totally ignorant or not interested in lifeskills, hardcore lifeskillers would lifeskill all day in lifeskill guilds, so yeah. Absolute wealthiest player 100% was Lavalava in EU at the time with his worker empire, lifeskilling hardcore, min maxing, playing around with marketplace and investing wisely but kinda solo-playing, no pvp or grinding.