while your right, it's also common sense that a TON OF GOLD would influence NPC's. I mean if my players were going to start bribing in a BIG way they.... wait.... they HAVE. It explains so much now!
Sure, but it's also obvious that magic items should be both potent and varied. Yet the DMG spends 20% of it's pages on them. Not just describing different items one after the other, but talking about the nature of rewards, alternatives to them, how specific rewards work, what players should expect, how often you should be giving rewards out as a DM, etc. Why couldn't they spend a fraction of the space giving some details on what you can do with adventurer quantities of gold?
The question isn't, "What are the possibilities of what my players could do," it's "How, specifically, should I implement specific examples of things my players might want to do, and what benefits should those things have?"
You can buy (for whatever meaning of "buy" you choose) a stronghold, yes, sure. How much do they cost? Ballpark? In what ways should I, as a DM, think about presenting it? In what ways should the players expect to benefit from it? In other words, where is the information that tells me, the DM, how I should run the game when the players come to me and say, "we want to build a stronghold," "we want to start an adventurers guild," etc., etc.
It's great that D&D allows you to invent whatever you want and put it in your game. However, it's
awful that that the game
requires you to invent so much whole-cloth. Like, holy cow, it's year
seven of 5e and there's nothing except third party products for anything outside the extremely narrow range of adventure paths, monster books, and lightweight setting books. And the quality of their adventure paths is still not
that high! What exactly is WotC's strategy? Produce a game for Adventurer's League and that's it? It certainly feels like that's the grand scope. They've done nothing to move beyond
just running another dungeon AP in the universal kitchen sink setting. It's really quite frustrating.