Is F2P dying a slow death?

I do agree a string of recent Marquee characters have a distinct paywall slant being slotted into hard nodes. They are expanding hard nodes to 8 attempts, but that just equates to 1-2 shards a day average instead of 0-1. That's still a significant paywall slant to players that but the blind pull packs or shards in shipments. But the big difference in swgoh over most mobile games. NOTHING stays behind the pay wall. Every single hero and ship eventually makes it into a farmable location. And free players actually get to see how the paywall tank of whales deals with the new addition. Is the new hero/ship worth the hype or is it a flash in the pan as it's quickly countered or virtually useless. The ones that turn out to be big game changers often see heros that most free players have get reworked to counter it and bring the game back into balance. So even if they are released to a hard node, free players have a good idea whether it's worth the long grind and the smart ones even have a full shopping list of all the gear needed to get from gear 1 to 12.