Eh..the thing about the JP is that they tend to use a face-saving reason rather than directly say no a lot. The GC restriction was probably more due to how hard it would be to code more than moral degradation, but you can't actually say "This is too hard to code," because its too direct. The chat in feast was them overreacting to the real problems at the time, matchmaking failures and healer roles, so they had to bandaid it to prevent even more loss. I think they are inconsistent, but its because they tend not to test or think about content enough; there's a really weird disconnect between devs and players in terms of focus. Like bard instruments and gpose over actual content.