You are seriously undervaluing the literal motto of Pokemon
If you think there is no downside to making 2 stars ridiculously expensive because "moderate" spenders of $500+ per expansion will be happy spending that amount to get 50% of the two stars, you're forgetting the original point of Pokémon. Having half of the two stars is significantly less than half as good as having all of them. But I am not going to spend $2500 every other month on this game, so now that you've removed completing the collection as a viable option for the new expansion, I've just changed my goal to complete through 1 stars, and I will spend no more on this expansion after that. You've cost yourself at least $500 from me over the next month, by destroying all potential utility of wonder picking without providing any hope that trading new expansion 2 stars is anywhere in sight.
If there is a way to link my account here to prove that I've spent over $1000 on gold prior to the most recent update (and see that I am not buying gold anymore), I'm more than happy to do so. And to make it 100% clear, I had previously quit spending gold after my first $500 or so, when I realized how hopeless completing the set would be. It is extremely demoralizing to spend $100 in a day and not get anything new, knowing you still have >10 cards missing and need to spend another $100 just to get enough pack exchange points - because odds are the next $100 won't yield a new card in the packs either.
Discovering people sharing their FCs on social media after they opened god packs brought me back to spending on the original expansions. It literally doubled my total spending! Not just paying for wonder pick hourglasses to complete the 2 star set, but also it motivated me to continue to spend on pack opening when all I was missing was a single crown card. I don't even think the crown cards are that nice looking, I'm not going to spend $100 on otherwise useless packs to get the remaining pack points because I want this card in a vacuum. I will do it in order to catch em all though, and with one away the end is in sight.
I have a feeling there are many others that are thinking the same way as me right now. It is better to have many people spend an extra $100 per expansion than a few people spend an extra $1000. You don't understand human psychology or the spirit of Pokemon if you think your most recent update was a step in the right direction. Or maybe you messed up your arithmetic?