I have had a similar experience with guild add-on checks in the past. My current guild wants certain add-ons for raids, but isn’t militant about it.
All your examples are not the same, might sound similar but are not.
For example, WeakAuras provides you a framework that allows you to create your own auras, there are actually people that sell their own auras for subs and stuff (not arguiging wether that’s good or bad)
TSM allows you to create your own groups and assosiations to manage your aunction house and items however you want
MDT allows you to plan your routes for a dungeon run.
Where am i going with this? selling a weak aura or a group operation on the side is like selling a route already planned, not the data for you to plan it yourself
so yeah, just wanted to point out that what he is doing is not the same, and basically renders the addon useless
Edit: to add, selling an aura or a route, or a group is like making a program on a programing language and selling the program, what he did with MDT is like removing functionality from the programming language itself
Update: looks like the addon author had reversed course. The addon is available again.
The guild that got world first Nathria spent about 50k real dollars on tokens to buy all the advantages they could get, same happened with boe corruption gear last race.
Game’s been pay to win at a high level for a while now, that’s just how it is. Don’t like it? Play another game, the moment we got a real money auction house and WoW fans accepted it even after Diablo 3 fans got theirs thrown away, the game was p2w.
Remember the main complaint about the RMAH in Diablo 3? ‘Gear does not drop enough in this game, it does not feel rewarding to do content’- that’s always going to be the main complaint in a pay to win game, that drop rates are slashed in order to go whaling.
And look- we have drop rates being cut heavily by Blizz, players angry about the unrewarding nature of the game, and the p2w complaints.