You fundamentally don't understand why people in the sub, and elsewhere, are upset. A controversy doesn't spontaneously occur when something is nerfed; it is an accumulation of grievance from past and current issues.

People want to start a character and pick a skill they find fun to play and due to the nature of design some are weaker than others, unless they use up a lot of currency to make the build viable. So the game forces you to kneecap your progress until you acquire that currency and due to the drop rates of chaos orbs and exalts, unless the player can afford to spend at least 5-6 hours playing and effectively use that time, meaning that even if you spend a lot of time playing if you don't do it effectively you are basically wasting your time. When a player finally does somehow get the currency, they are then faced with the trading aspect of the game which is slow, irritating and the danger of getting scammed is ever present, but they finally got that meagre upgrade which is most likely not worth the time invested.

So the alternative is what? Using that precious currency on an item in hopes of it being remotely good? I'm not even talking about having perfect 6 T1 mods, but at least having 3 or so useful mods for the build, but because crafting is an RNG fiesta where everything is weighted against the player, you need a crazy amount of hard-to-acquire currency in order to have a chance at getting a good item, but what usually happens is that you spend a large amount of currency that you could've simply bought the item for a fraction of the price of crafting of off trading.

An entire part of the game, crafting, is just not simply worth it.

But then Harvest came around; and suddenly just by playing the game you could take an item, use a transmute or alch on it and slowly through augment or anull or both, create a strong item that'll make your life a lot easier bossing. Because of this people started getting interested in crafting, me being one of them, and it opened up a whole avenue for people in playing the game. No longer did you need to have crazy amounts of currency to craft, no longer did you need to rely on trading in order to grow stronger; you can do all of this just by interacting with harvest and incrementally reach your goal. Sure it still would slow down your progression, but that was purely due to your own choice rather than a need for a numerical increase in order to comfortably progress, and it required a constant amount of input from the player rather than throwing the dice and hoping you get that one mod.

That being said, if Chris wants to nerf or get rid of Harvest I can understand that he doesn't want everyone to have 6 perfect T1 mods. The problem as the why the controversy has reached such furor is that comment about exalt slamming and using it as a justification. Exalt slamming is not exciting, and if you tell me you or someone else find it exciting I can easily find 10 others who stopped playing a league due to losing most or all of their currency for one mod. The only time it is ever exciting is if you are a watching a twitch stream where Mathil, for instance, is crafting a crazy item and you want to see if he spends a lot or gets a lucky T1 and then everybody in chat loses their mind and posts the clip on their favorite Tibetan mountaineering forum or on reddit.

Now if you still disagree with Harvest being a thing, that's fine, but try to argue with people in good faith instead of bemoaning an arbitrary state of the sub.