I think you made the mistake of believing this decision was made by "devs", it likely wasn't. It was made by the decision makers whose primary motivation is profit. So decisions like making the Falcon a requirement had no basis in things like gameplay value or strategy, it was based on knowing that whales will shell out even more so that their guild has an advantage over others.
Sadly, however, they fail to see the long-term fallout of decisions like this. And that is, they will turn away a large portion of their player base and they cannot live on whales alone (primarily because the whales will get bored if there's no one left to compete against).
Clearly they will push as hard as possible to get every penny out of us they can until their spreadsheets tell them it's having a negative effect. Hopefully, the extremely poorly designed and transparently profit-driven TB will tip the scales against them.
