That's because there was barely any promos in the old days. When I started playing the only thing available each week was TOTW cards. You can't compare the old games to what they have now with their money grubbing practices.
Personally, I'm very used to playing with a gold team. Now they have introduced playstyles which means any player without the playstyles are terrible, and it's another attempt to get people to spend money. I literally just scrolled youtube and saw a another video by a content creator of him spending points in the store. Why? Because he wants a video of him getting the top cards, you can't act like we all just pull them from sbc packs.
You also didn't give me a good idea of what you believe a medium priced player is. You say these players are discard, but apart from icons discard is like 11k, which a lot of players still aren't.