AGREE COMPLETELY. This is a case of totally ruining two skills for the majority of players to supposedly 'fix' a problem of scripters by actually making it better for the scripters (now they are the only one's who can mine/chop 24/7 to get the rare woods/ingots as they don't need to worry about dying of boredom when they click their 'go' button and go shopping or whaever).
Legitimate players got screwed every way you look at it. I hate the void pool and find it pretty much mindless killing for zip reward, and I don't want to trade in 3:1 on upscaling wood/ingots as that is pointless nor spend hours doing something I don't like to get boosts for them. As for merchant ships, yeah you get 'some' resources but agree, no where near enough to make a dent in a couple of large bods and frankly the effort in canon resorces just to take them down is a lesson in outright complication for complications sake and not really worth the amount of man hours required to go fight merchants. If you could also get rewards of orc ship parts etc it might be ok but you don't get them just the resources, and spending like 20 mins finding and taking down one of them for like 60-80 val ingots is moronic. Right now I have lots of bods requiring val ingots but the ONLY way I can fill em is to buy val ingots off the damn scripters which I refuse to do. My last few mining sessions of around 2-3 hours each netted me something like 80 val ingots. Whoopee, and I haven't found a frostwood tree in the last 6-10 times I have been out, the last one I actually 'found' gave me 40 Frost boards and 80 plain boards and chopped out after 2 goes so whoop, a huge 80 frostwood boards.
I used to LOVE mining and lumberjacking,not any more.
What really gets me is instead of the devs saying "Ok, we made a mistake, we will change it back" they keep tossing these moronic other ways (void pool, merchants, vet reward carts etc) as a way to appease us, but it just isn't good enough. Like i really wanna blow my limited vet rewards on stuff that I should be able to get in game given I invested the points and time to train the skill up.
I just wish they would listen to the MAJORITY of us and put it BACK instead of leaving it as it is to just to please the scripters.