No, they didn’t expect people to drop professions every single week and do every single profession quest every single week.
They had already fixed the initial profession quests to only grant rep twice per toon. (Like two professions total). This was fixed shortly after people exploited to to get to rank 5/6.
Then this is fixing the fact they didn’t immediately fix the weekly quests as well.
This very clearly falls into exploit territory because they fixed the first bug and people found another bug similar to it an exploited it again.
I posted about this last week in the hotfix thread, and have an active ticket open about it - but are you guys going to refund the Spark of Ingenuity people used on this before you hotfixed it to no longer require a Spark Item? Or are you just saying “you’re screwed” to people who did?