I read the first few pages of this thread. If this has been said already, I don't give a ****.
There is a huge difference between playing the mechanics of the game and exploiting it. Playing the mechanics of the game to your advantage is building defensive troop buildings for the 5% plunder increase, or converting to spy so you can't be hit with no gold out. These are things that anyone with common sense would agree on.
Now, an exploit, or a 'use in an unfair and selfish way', is far different. Pwars were an exploit, because the war system was not created for the purpose of transferring hundreds of billions of gold to OSFs. Similarly, the tower build is an exploit, in that defense towers were not created for the purpose of making people invulnerable to attacks, but to simply make it tougher to win an attack on them. Pwars are gone because devs got tired of people exploiting the war system. And this new exploit will be gone someday too because I'm sure it will become common practice and estoc wars will return to turtle wars if this trend keeps growing.