If you could post a link with the % of revenue from top players then you might have an arguement.
The criticisms are widespread and huge amounts of people are getting disillusioned with the game, i'm not sure a few apologists are going to turn the tide by lying to themselves.
First, heroes.
It's not so much as the balancing, but rather the approach that SC adopted to reach the final version of the "balanced heroes". Summary of heroes "balancing":
Introduce heroes--> introduce 10 more levels ---> introduce hero abilities ---> reduce heroes' offense stats and/or hp ---> reduce heroes regen time.
Too many heroes buff were introduced before SC dropped the bomb on us saying that they felt that heroes were OP and needs balancing. Also, the justified hero regen time reduction came 5 weeks after they were rebalanced.
It's the little things that make players realize that SC is subtly trying to squeeze players.
Funny how they will NEVER reduce heroes regen time before the stat balancing. One might even argue that SC was testing the waters and plan to do without the regen time reduction if players don't make too big of a fuss. Oh, and our dearly beloved youtube representative also made no effort to point out that the regen times would need balancing (probably too busy enjoying the all expense paid trip than to act their part as community representatives).
Secondly, Champ League play. 2stars on maxed based are still as easy as hot knife through butter with maxed heroes. So no, heroes balancing did nothing to fix the OPness of offense. Just look at the defense wins of top players.
Third, useless elixir. This is a typical example of how far behind SC are when it comes to keeping up with the latest gameplay. Ever since spells were changed to cost elixir, trophy pushing had been impossible without going in with full lix storages, or boosting lix collectors. Then came clan wars and BOOM! Goodbye excess elixir. Those requests asking for elixir to be useful was loooong before these two updates. Basically ever since clan wars came our elixir had been reasonably scarce. These are already sufficient as an elixir sink that players had been asking for. But of course, SC had to try their luck in seeing how far they can squeeze us. So here we are, nexting through base after base offering 30k elixir.
If this is a result of listening to players, they need to clean the wax off their ears because they aren't hearing right.
You are forgetting the casual players that will gem the last bit of resources before logging off in order to start an upgrade and because it's just "too hard" to get the rest of the required amount. It's obvious that BK at TH7 without a DE drill was introduced to cash in from that sort of player. I suppose Supercell is trying to "encourage" the gemming of other resources as well.
I don't think many players stop boosting because the loot is bad, I expect most casual players that boost do so to reduce waiting times, so that they can actually play the game when they are on. It's the hardcore farmers who boost and then monitor gold per hour.
Also elixir was never useless in higher leagues, you always had to manage your elixir as you progressed up the leagues.
I was almost a lone voice when I said what a stupid idea it was to create an elixir dump, but 99.9% of people on here were declaring it the best thing ever.
Going on your elix comment.
Then make elix into walls avail at th10 then.
Now everyone has the ability to suck the lifeblood out of the game. Which they have done.
You need proof of this? Do the math and see how many gems it takes to max out a base. Then, ask some champions level no-lifers how many gems a month it takes to stay relevant. Now, multiply that by the number of no-lifers there are, and voila, you've got a huge profit off of these people. Like I said, they make a killing. You don't need actual numbers to define, a killing. One can infer based on prior knowledge and common sense.