At the risk of tedium, allow me to summarize the complaint as succinctly as I can:
1) official treasure tables yield hundreds of thousands of gold
2) official gold sinks only concern downtime
3) official adventures have next to zero downtime
Ergo, heroes sit on piles of gold they have no use for.
Note the distinct lack of old-edition references or nostalgia in this simple line of argument.
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Official content also says you can make adjustments to the system and story to suit your table. Back to this in a moment...
The original post has been heavily edited, but if you check back on page 2, you'll see it quoted. At the bottom, the poster solicits advice from people running non-official content. This is why we had a lot of people coming into defend against the accusation the system is broken. Most of us run unofficial content (or official content with allowances for extra downtime or other means of spending wealth), so we don't have a problem with the system as it stands. Perhaps our adding
why we don't have a problem to the discussion is more than the OP and others wanted, but hey, public forum.
In any case, I think the developers expect most players will not run official content exclusively, and that expectation informed their decision. All this is speculation on my part since I wasn't involved in play testing, but my feeling is that APs contain large amounts of gold without explicit methods of spending it because they want wealth to enable DMs and players to pursue certain options
if it suits their table. You don't miss out on anything by having too much wealth.
Between having a) a tightly implemented system of wealth distribution that supports character progression as anticipated by someone not sitting at my table and b) a poorly implemented system that results in me tailoring wealth distribution and spending to my players' needs, I'll actually choose b. Something which has repeatedly come up in this thread and continues to baffle me is this assertion that figuring out b is hard work.
An aside, your 3 point summary is valid for AL players, where DMs are not so empowered. However, AL's apparent goal to throttle the distribution of magic items means purchasing them will never materialize as an official option in that venue, so it's kind of a moot point. APs need to be shared between AL and non-AL tables, and if the choice is between AL players having the "right amount of wealth" and non-AL tables being enabled to do fun storytelling stuff with "too much wealth," the developers are going to go with the latter. That's why I say it's a design choice, not a flaw in the system.
