If I am not mistaking Yoshida gave us permission 3 separate times to pwrlvl. twice before in dev post and once in a live letter.

So if he penalizes anyone after telling them it is 100% ok to do... well yea he will lose a ton of players.

An exploit is doing something wrong, he gave us permission to pwrlvl saying he feels it is 100% ok.

He was warned this would happen by hundreds of people, he ignored it, it is now Yoshida's fault not the playerbase. Would be like taking everyones gil away because leves use to give too much... so we exploited leves to get alot of gil.