That's the worst irony about it, THEY DON'T EVEN MAKE SPENDING MONEY REWARDING. This is what drove me away from the game about a year ago, it was Living Story S2 and Heart of Thorns the brought me back. I really hope this expansion is fun.
I feel like cosmetics are the endgame reward that Anet intends. They're long-term goals that keep people playing after the great fun of playing the content for the first time, but the cash shop interferes with that idea significantly, and I think the game is worse off for it. I know why it's there, and I pretty much asked for it by limiting myself to buy-to-play MMO's, but these are my thoughts on it.
I'm not sure the key farm nerf is really all that significant. Key farming was fairly time consuming, even before the new player experience changes which nerfed it a bit. I probably farmed 25-30 keys before that nerf and only got enough scraps for 1 ticket. The rest of the stuff from the chests was largely trash. This is not atypical.
Over the weekend I finished out the Dwayna set making it my second full set of Black Lion weapons. My first set was Daydreamer. I didn't spend any gems on keys or farm any keys. I just bought them straight off the trading post with gold. If you want one of the skins, just buy it with gold.
Doing some rough calculations I probably spent at least 8.5 hours doing key farming and got one ticket out of it. Today, in the same amount of time for considerably less effort, I could at least get enough gold doing Silverwastes runs to buy 1 of whatever Black Lion weapon is currently going for 1 ticket. If you're savvy enough to play the trading post, it's even easier to make enough money.
In summation, if you've got your eye on a Black Lion weapon, there's much easier and more efficient ways to get it than key farming or gems. The only way the new nerf might affect this is it might cause prices of Black Lion weps on the TP to rise, but we'll have to see if the key drop rate bump is enough to offset it. That is assuming that a good portion of those weps on the TP come from key farmers. I have no idea how much they actually contribute to the supply.
Also, if you've been gone a while you may be happy to know that Arenanet has stopped adding new armors sets to the gem store. Now they only make outfits (which are unmixable sets that are worn over armor) for the gem store and future armors are to be available through in game means. The carapace and luminescent sets were the ones we got after this change and there should be more coming in HoT.
