So long as we have layers collapsing there will be far less resources to go around. The argument for layers is so the world will feel full. Doesn’t everybody want this? I’m sure farmers, which is pretty much everyone to some degree would like a good amount of time for a dead world. Seeing as how subscribers can layer hop whenever they want, blizzard might as well embrace it and keep layers open enough for people to choose what they want. I don’t see a downside to this other than some people having to manually layer swap more than they’d like. Would probably contribute to a tighter community given that it’s something we’d need others for.
Another reason resources are so expensive is all the raw gold being farmed in instances and distributed into the economy. This is textbook inflation. Blizzard needs a way to reclaim as much of this gold as possible so selling desired items like flasks, lotus, crystals etc… at a certain (high) price would essentially mean that those resources would never exceed a certain price and give farmers some room to still make money if they’d like to undercut.
I imagine there would be some unintended consequences I haven’t thought of, but throwing this out since we seemingly have blizzard’s attention.