I agree that it is easier to acquire money now than it was a while ago. I attribute this to the sudden free flow of the billions of GP that have lied dormant in unwanted accounts prior to February 2011 and also to the very quick pace that GP can travel from one account to another through staking and trading. However, even more rapid than the increase of GP flow has been the increase of production of everything else. Lobsters at 100gp each, swordfish at 160gp just as examples (these are obviously the results of bots). Generally speaking, an inflation is defined as an increase in the price niveau of commonly traded items, so based on these statistics I'm not sure we can define our situation as such.
Just as clarification, paying for 95 prayer or 96 herblore doesn't remove GP, it simply passes it on to the next guy. Also, I don't think Jagex is having half the problem balancing the amount of GP coming in and going out (it's at a healthy level right now; remember, new active accounts require a higher quantity of GP) than they are having making sure that enough of the GP trickles down from the rich players to the poor noobs, especially now that bots have degraded typical money"making" methods in this game that once gave new players a decent amount to play with. One could argue that the high cost of dragon bones and herblore ingredients is doing just that, though, so perhaps it's less of a problem than we may think.
Yeah it's kind of funny how that worked out. People need a lot of money to fund their 95 pray/96 herblore? Farm the GP. Demand for supplies increase? Use bots to fill the new gap in supply.
You're right, this was obviously not Jagex' intention, but it wasn't really their fault. Like I stated above, they probably simply wanted more GP to trickle from rich accounts to newbies by increasing the public's demand for basic resources, what they didn't think about or didn't regard is that most of the demand would be neutralized with bots :whistling:. But you must admit, the updates probably did give a lot of newbies the chance to get out of the poor house.
I believe the gap between the SUPER rich and the rich will increase, but not so much the gap between the poor and the rich. There's lots of stuff to do in Runescape for a beginner, and without too much effort everything is affordable. Not everybody has an undying need for a partyhat or elysian spirit shield.
I find it sad that you find yourself in the need to justify a well thought-out and intellectual topic as opposed to the mind-numbing 3 liner posts that have become popular in these boards. Good topic, man.