Costly doesn't mean just gold, it can be a time sink. And sometimes you can't throw money at the problem, even paying well it wasn't easy to outsource people gathering boulders in MO1 so only the people motivated to do the siege would do it and that took considerable time.Yeah but "more costly" isn't going to change anything. Over time gold becomes pretty useless and most everyone eventually is sitting on stacks and stacks of the gear they need. So what else you gonna spend the gold on? Besides trinket charges. Its not a solution...its just some lazy idea SV came up with.
This is all going to change with the supply chain thing but I expect there are time sinks involved there that you can't just buy your way out of.