I want an official response.

[Felessan]

no they are not popular, i did post on another thread an interesting subject about the % of people buying stuff in the Free 2 play model, showing that only 2-3% of the whole playerbase really purchase stuff. but still this model survive, even if it's the biggest scam of the time. since the name it's a lie, the game is never free.

Standard metrics for F2P game is that around 10% (of actually playing) pays money and around 1-2% pays A LOT of money.
And those 10% still much more than cash shop haters as majority of players just don't really care whether cashshop in game or not (none of my in-game friends really care about this enough to affect their decision to play in any way)

it cost them almost nothing and bring them a loooot of cash...

You should be gratefull than, because game gets additional money for improvement and it is someone else who pay the bill.

very very very low count of post on the forum. they rarely go over 100 post some have even less than 50 post count, meaning this people that are fast to answer are only there for defend the cash shop.

Number of post in no way meaningful, the crowd that like to sit on the forum have similar mentality and thus cannot represent game population as a whole. The number of low post members in resistance shows that there are a lot of resistance outside usual forum crowd. A lot of people take game less serious to get so much emotionally invested, so they not go to the forum to share their opinion (just sometimes read something, look at info etc) and for them such hard push against cash shop is an offense, as for them buying stuff in cash shop ruin nothing in their casual play on one hand, on other hand they do want some fluffy stuff without being gated behind 5 mil gil pricetag, which is just unattainable for many.

[AxelDH]

Would've been nice if perhaps they added like, 6 new dyes at once; 3 in game, and 3 paid extras. Putting it all on the store is annoying!