It just got soooooooo much harder, not just by a little bit. Powering up gyms is not really worth it, the easy way is to knock some gyms down or find some small gyms where you can add a pokemon without doing anything, then cash in, and watch all pokemon come back dead in less than 12 hours. So its a daily grind that takes several hours.
In terms of dust, gyms are dead, not just during this event but in general. Catching 50 pokemon in one hour is relatively easy with the recent changes. Taking your spot in 10 gyms in one hour is much harder. So just catch pokemon, forget the gyms, if you want dust and XP.
But it really screwed over the free to play players by ruining the only source of gold apart from spending money.
After the changes, i successfully knocked down some level 10 gyms, its easy. I never succeeded in leveling up a gym that needs 8000 points to level it up, i tried, what ends up happening is that someone notices the fighting as you spend 45 minutes grinding it up, gives it a quick little kick, and you grinded it up from 42000 to 47000 and now its 34000, and you give up and move on and instead knock down a level 10 gym just out of frustration.
That was the early days, when level 10 gyms still existed after the massive change. Now i just spread the misery by on purpose destroying any gym above level 4, indicating that someone was dumb enough to spend time powering it up. Its pointless, all i do is to occasionally destroy a few gyms and putting in some random pokemon to cash in maybe 30 gold.
Then it also favors cheaters who use 3 accounts. The gyms they knock down to cash in will be 6000/8000 instead of 2000/4000 because they use two additional accounts to put something in, actually giving their gyms a chance to survive 21 hours if they do this to many gyms.
Also, team balance went down the drain. The gyms used to be something like 40% blue, 35% red and 25% yellow, now non-blue gyms are rare. I happen to be blue so it does not affect me too much, the other teams got screwed even harder. I see so many gyms that i cannot destroy because they are blue that i have even more incentive to go for it if i see anything red or yellow anywhere.
Its work harder, and nothing stays for 21 hours, so work hard every day for very little reward.
