I believe that the fatigue is definitely overall beneficial to the health of the game. I'm speaking as someone with a hand in all 3 DoL. If you can't see how allowing unlimited gathering would pretty much ruin the market for materials well then it's your own personal failure of imagination. As it stands DoH demand for materials is pretty limited at least on my server, pairing it with a nearly endless supply is just going to lead to nightmares. So while SE may be portraying the fatigue as some sort of Anti-RMT countermeasure, which I don't doubt it is, it has a secondary benefit of maintaining at least a baseline of economic well being.
What Reika is advocating isn't something that I can stand behind, but I wouldn't mind them removing the double penalty of Fatigue/Surplus on DoL. But another though that occured to me is why not replace the current system that just tracks successful gathers with one that is a bit more specific, and sort of places a seperate fatigue for each class of item or by region? Maybe I hit fatigue on Iron, but I can still go begin anew and mine Silver over in The Blackshroud? Maybe make the fatigue counter be 80 or 90 successes per class under this scenario.