I'm sorry but your own personal experience as a diamond farmer does not somehow invalidate mine or others' experience. My points about the diamond nerf affecting many players significantly absolutely still stands, despite your being insulated from it, simply due the way you happen to play the game.
I'm guessing you're referring to still being able to fight through the first 4 levels of GE? Sure, I can as well, and that never changed. I don't see how I'm "wrong again" about that when I never even mentioned anything about that in the first place. When I was talking about people having their "feet knocked out from underneath them" I was referring almost purely to the loss in diamond income, which is substantial for those who used GE as a main source of diamonds. GE may not have been one of your main sources of diamonds, but it was for many, myself included.
Also, you mentioned that "there is nothing in GE5 that is effective outside of GE5 that I can't get the equivalent elsewhere without ever having to mess with GE5. Forgotten Temple? Forget it." Well, that's just patently FALSE. How could you possibly hope to increase your city's (non-GB) FP efficiency by 20%, short of spending literally tens of thousands of diamonds on events for better event buildings (which would take months, btw)? The Temple literally does that instantly when built, and only requires 4 weeks of completing GE5, and maybe hundreds of diamonds in negotiations over those 4 weeks, rather than the probably 15k+ with the other method. So yeah, in no meaningful way could you honestly view the two as "equivalent."
Ok so to start with, it's 40% attack AND defense for attacking army, PLUS 50% attack AND defense for defending army, in a 3x4 space! Again, can you add that to your city in other ways, of course you can. Can you add all of that to your city in the same 3x4 space? Not a chance! The attack (and defense) efficiency of your city instantly rises quite a bit with the construction of the FT, and it's disingenuous in the extreme to act as if you can possibly replicate that in any other way, because you simply can't. You can add sentinel outposts, winner's plazas, etc. to match that attack, sure, but the space required to match it would be MUCH greater; i.e. way less efficient.
Again, just because that's your particular experience, doesn't mean it applies to everyone else. GE5 may not be worth it to you personally, but for many others, a 20% FP increase and a significant enhancement to a city's attack/defense efficiency is worth a heck of a lot, and to just gloss over that fact like it's irrelevant is not only dismissive, it's also pretty darn short-sighted and myopic.
You say my opinions are "wrong" and call people "apologists" and "shills" for having a different viewpoint all you want, but no amount of ad hominem attacks will ever make your argument more compelling, persuasive, or factually correct, especially when that argument is also littered with logical fallacies and specious statements of supposed fact.