I agree with you on the whole botting thing, for the record I was here when the drone regions were introduced and the loot was nerfed, so perhaps I should have clarified that I was speaking of recent changes. but it's hard to type on a ****** smartphone keyboard so I kept it brief. The laptop is out today though so I in order to defend my point... The whole reason why the ships are going up in price is because CCP are increasing the amounts of minerals they require for production, as mentioned in their own dev posts they could have lowered them or even averaged them across all 3 vessels per battleship line but they didn't do so because it would have been recessionary... Ergo CCP do not want mineral costs to drop as they don't want a recession in eve. That's why I think that the coming changes to the game will be structured in a way that supports the economy and keeps the prices of items inflating.

Now I personally think that inflation is a bad thing and that if we had serious drops in prices and the economy became deflationary that would be a good thing as ships and modules would cost less and players might be more willing to risk them in pvp or exploratory actions like mining in low/null or wh space.

Personally I take great exception at high levels of dev interference in a supposedly 'player driven economy' as touted in the advertising if prices drop or rise due to player activity I'm all for it.