In a sense, I actually partially agree with you, but only about the priorities bit. This item / suggestion should've indeed waited until some other clearly more important issues were addressed.
As to the actual suggestion, the original proposal would've helped everyone. As a no-cost thing, it would've addressed a reason for botting, which is to build the city buildings / resource fields while offline, just like troops and wall fortifications can still be made offline in a queued fashion.
The problem is that Evony mangled it when they made it a pay-for-the-privilege item. They did this because of either greed or the lack of understanding about the benefits of just doing this one for the players. Since this is not a no-cost ("free") item, it won't reduce an incentive for botting. The only thing it will do is give spending players even more of an advantage. The non-spending players and the spending players who think that it isn't a good enough value will just continue to bot...

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