Except that that isnt true. At all.
And then you go on to explain in great detail how exactly it is true. The fact that you don't like the mechanism by which it's true doesn't change the very simple fact that you were not impacted by the ability to make 20M credits in an hour by doing long range hauling.
And I'll not be addressing your reductions to the absurd.
No offense, but anyone who claims that mechanics dont need to be balanced because 'you dont have to use it' simply disqualify themselves from any reasonable discussion about game design.
I'd argue that those LRH runs were a small beacon of balance in a game full of grind and not-fun timesinks. Mission payouts in general have always been insultingly low (<1M for going hundreds of LY? 250K for going against an NPC that can turn you into space swiss cheese, and get you wanted by authorities?)
The fact that these runs were the best way to shortcut the not-fun and get to the fun is an indictment of the rest of the game, not the runs. Frontier apparently wants me to earn my way to an Anaconda and associated fittings one ~250K mission at a time. You're going to spend about 500 million to buy an Anaconda and A-fit it, and another 25 million to afford the rebuy, and that's long before we get into RNGineer grind.
That's the other reason these runs were so useful - credit rewards do not scale properly with skill/progression. A player that's triple elite with aforementioned anaconda is still going to be getting the same crap-tier missions as when they were a newbie in a sidewinder. Rewards for being faction allied with the best paying stations in the game are not appropriate.
This would be like being level 100 in World of Warcraft and receiving level 1 gold and exp for a level 100 quest.
That you yourself even go so far as to consider any discussion about game mechanics to be 'dumping biowaste on people that chose to play the game differently' is absolutely absurd.
The fact that you characterize my complaints as against the concept of discussion about game mechanics, rather than the dishonest manner you and others choose to conduct that discussion, is more than a little ironic.