CoC is a freemium progression game. Play free to progress slowly, play a lot and/or buy gems to go quicker.
Sniping broke that fundamental aspect of the game, at least in the upper leagues (> Champ 1).
It made the game ridiculously easy, I admit I had been upgrading both heroes at same time and still doing multiple lvl11 walls per day in Titan 3. In other words, the incentive to buy gems was pretty much gone for a lot of high level players because of the sniping "loophole".

All this to say I understand why SC wanted to address sniping, in upper leagues it rigged the game, let's be honest.

What followed, abolishing sniping altogether in one bold move, sent a shockwave through the game however. Judging by the rating trend in the stores and this forum, a lot of players are not happy and it is safe to say that the difficulty of the game (if we can agree the goal is "progress" for most players, not trophies) has increased considerably for the mid town hall players (7/8/9), and game speed has decreased a lot for higher town hall players (10/11).
The game speed decrease in turn caused undesired side effects, like the dropping of a lot of high level players to lower leagues, which is diametrically opposed to what SC has been trying to achieve (through higher league bonus etc.), i.e. a more even distribution of mostly same strength players. Or less chat in high level clans, because players go offline in between attacks due to long army build times (aided by the new, degressive shield).

Now, the pendulum should swing back a little.

My suggestion would be to address the higher leagues issue first: they are slow gameplay and not enough players.
How to get higher level players in higher level leagues? The most obvious answer is a higher league bonus.

But there are other ways too. How about a league barrack bonus?

The higher the league you are in, the faster your troops will build. Let's say your troops would finish 50% faster in Titan 3 compared to e.g. Gold 3? It would be a great incentive to move up, wouldn't it? Of course it will decrease gemming troops a little, but any incentive will and without incentive nothing will change.

Thoughts?