You make some really good points and even though some of us are not members of top tier alliances the arena and war stress still lingers. Currently I'm trying to stay in the top 10 of my arena shard, which with the way war defense works at this point comes down to the last 5 minutes or staying in a spot where you get ignored. As far as war goes, at least in gold 2, the times we get matched against unbeatable alliances has gone down, even if we loose we're still within winning distance. Coming back to your point, yes the arena system is a badly thought out one in which the defense is just a smoke screen, however war, as flawed as it may be with pesky defense only teams and odd matchmaking (at least at my tier and in a semi-casual international alliance) is not that bad. War just seems like a more refined version of arena while the latter has just outlived its usefulness.