Pretty much this.
Dynamis allowed high playtime players to exploit low playtime players because low playtime players devoted 8 of their 16 hours a week to Dynamis instead of farming gil so they could potentially pay for the Dynamis glass. They also wasted a good portion of their remaining 8 hours a week doing things like re-buffering and farming so they can pay for Echo drops/reraise items. It's not that they couldn't show up for events, it's that the event consumed enough of their time that sponsorship was an unreasonable goal. If you aren't sponsoring in a sponsor shell, then you're not profiting.
Do low playtime players not deserve to profit from the time they spend doing an event? Sponsorship was a roadblock to this no matter how you cut it.
Also, I'm speaking more from the experiences of my friends that have bitched to me while in such shells than from personal experience above. I saw where the money was going about two runs after joining my first "sponsor" Dynamis shell and quit. They were terrible players and it was unprofitable. A few months later, I was a part of one of the first sell/split Dynamis groups on my server. It tanked when the leader quit, so I joined a big shell that did everything (including Dynamis), and then a few years later I helped lead another sell/split Dynamis group.
I distributed an average of ~350k/city run and ~100k/outlands and negative/nothing from CoP (all of the profits). The shell wasn't exactly a super-exclusive elite-fest, everything was "comment four items," and after your first run everyone was equal. We had a pretty regular and small group, so there were no real lotting issues and we were (at most) only gunning for a few of each item. Dynamis went from being a 3 hour chore to a fun way for people to make gil. The AF you wanted didn't drop? Doesn't matter, we each made 300k.


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