While I understand the frustration of someone who grinded the game and got their progression erased, imagine the frustration of everyone playing Splinterlands seeing someone earn close to 10k SPS a day by doing 1 try, without having to invest much (and 0 in SPS for a long time). Especially when no one in Splinterlands is earning those values, at least from playing in one account.
I'm not sure what was the exploit in SK but I believe it was something like of taking advantage of a gameplay oversight, am I correct? I don't think players individually should be punished for that. It would have been different if it was something like what happened in Splinterlands where someone was minting DEC with season rentals abuse. The SK team should have taken action much sooner in order to avoid risking losing the SPS rewards.
At this point, this was the only possible solution. There is no way (I assume) of knowing who exploited and who didn't to only move down some people. It is what it is and it's better than just losing the SPS rewards for SK and also better than just allowing free massive SPS extraction.
This is blockchain so there should be a way to see who exploited what but I think the issue is that there were probably no Terms of Service to clarify the definitions. With regards to earning a uneven amount of SPS, that is the economics of supply and demand. The DAO approved a SPS reward pool, if only a handful were playing because they had the assets to play with, they should be rewarded. However, the DAO is in it rights to adjust the reward pool accordingly. None of these options were done; instead, a reset... I have over 1.5m SPS so I know I cannot be considered using an exploit when I probably got less than 2k SPS from playing all these months as I was rarely on the top of the leaderboards (probably due to exploits). Mismanaged in the end and a waste of millions of DEC I invested now years ago (2022 I believe).