@jebluscrhist This is certainly not the first example of Sea of Thieves doing this or casting old player bases aside. They have been developing quite a habit of giving away old rare cosmetic items, hell recently they gave away the scars which were super rare to see and now everyone has them.
If I may get slightly off-topic further proof of a disregard for the original player base would be Duke's black market and how those were meant to be limited-time items, but now you can buy them all for SLIGHTLY higher price. there's also the mermaid gems which are stupidly plentiful and give rep to anything you need. How about all the double XP weekends? I mean look at last December where the whole month was geared towards making everyone Pirate Legend, Something that was stated by the developers as being something rare to see and difficult to achieve. you use to see pirate legend ships and know that person or crew had a stupid amount of time on the game and was not to be taken lightly but now I see so many pirate legends that don't even understand how the sails work or that sloops go faster against the wind and galleys go fastest against.
There goes a quote which I don't remember who to tribute it to but it goes something like "if you are going to hurt me then hurt me, just don't lie to me." so Rare, I don't care what you do with the game at this point you have already gone back on a couple of things, and that's fine it's your game but stop lying about things and either just give everything away or stick to your guns and stop. D*cking people over.