The fatal flaw with the current business model.

but I wanted to try and shed light on why complete honesty isn't always the best policy.

I'm not sure you are aware of this, as girasol wasn't, but a lot of players, had their whole world shell shocked because of this policy. There was a confirmed data leak and it wasn't until a year in a half until Nexon started forcing password resets, even longer for them to even acknowledge it, and it wasn't even to us, it was to a magazine. When we jumped to the chance of compensation, a word we never thought we'd hear, we got notoriously jipped, the items being timeless, some of us couldn't even wear. Then to add insult to injury they gave us dark scrolls for a *chance* to get some stats back, or blowing up the very items. This is after they released GM scrolls for an event. Then to kick us further in the balls, another data like leak happened 6 months later, where nexon compensated this newer generation for 250-500k nx. When we asked for the same treatment, we were told we received an adequate compensation, when genuinely I don't think we had a choice in the matter.

So with that said, I think any player with a brain knows that complete transparency concerning "hacking" is just shooting yourself in the foot concerning it would create a huge vulnerability. The dialogue is more about this NX policy vs in game content policy. Which leads to your later part of the post because it seems it's the head branch that isn't aware how disproportional it not only is, but just how it has become a cancer. A game cannot rely on cube variants and cash shop scrolls that periodically get added/removed every 3 months. You fall on this top 10% dependency which is so extreme and overwhelming I'd say half a dozen players a year rise up to the occasion.