The handling of the Garuda exploit was disappointing and the damage is irrevocable, but it revealed a lot about the character of the playerbase that the devs will hopefully bear in mind in the future. Asking players politely to not exploit a bug with no risk of a ban amounts to an invitation to exploit it as much as humanly possible before it gets fixed.

We also got to see that a lot of "hardcore" shells turned out to be cowards who couldn't get the fight down before the exploit, then rushed 7/7 before patch instead of learning it, and now go around saying, "oh, yeah, I haven't done Garuda since patch because I'm bored of it already". Nobody cares about who has Garuda weapons anymore, but we'll remember for a long time who came to play and who wussed out.