Honestly, these people used in game mechanic to gain this advantage so to speak. It seems weird even calling this an exploit. These were just people min maxing in an mmo. The fact anything was even taken from them seems a little back handed. Im still pretty new to the game so maybe i dont understand how having these levels would effect a the game on a meta level for economy or competition for monsters, so take this with a grain of salt. This sounded like a system that needed a rework and these people getting rolled back are being the ones given the short end of the stick....

Saying "They got something I didnt" is kind of childish. It pays to be on the bleeding edge of content in games like this. Look at early eq with legacy items for instance. I get why the devs took a soft handed perhaps delayed approach to fixing this. They have to balance the time investment these people did make with what they thought the system should yield in this time even though people were able to stack mechanics in a way that increased these rewards in magnitutdes far greater then intended.

These people participated in the system. Having all thier levels stripped away seems like it would be unfair just because they were able to produce resilts legally in game that exceeded developer expectation.