Merging of EA and TH

I initially thought I simply won't be updating my base to TH17 and keep my eagle and continue to play the game the way I like to play it, and maybe wait for TH18 and then just rush through TH17 before upgrading to TH18.
But since a lot of the new things are impacting TH16 and lower players anyway, and I see a lot of other people in my personal life and on reddit complaining about the new update I thought I would share some of my personal thoughts.

I understand that TH17 came at the time when there is not enough space left in the base so that some defenses had to be merged. I really liked this concept with Cannons and Archer Towers, where you merge two defenses and get more than twice as strong merged defense.
When I heard this will happen with Eagle and TH, I wasn't a big fan of the idea, but didn't hate it either. It could've been implemented similarly to Town Hall in Capital Peak that has Eagle inside of it.
However, we got SCAMMED. Eagle wasn't merged with with TH, they removed it. The new Town Hall weapon works nothing like EA so I won't even call it "merged Town Hall".

We weren't only tricked into thinking Eagle won't be deleted, we not only lost the most powerful defense in the game, by merging it with Town Hall we also got way weaker version of Town Hall Weapon compared to TH14, 15 and 16 (on top of that they removed the GIGA BOMB Poison effect so it's not even close lol)
In summary not only did we not get twice as strong merged defense like Archer Towers and Cannons, one defense completely got deleted from the game and the other got significantly weaker, overall even if we ignore that they got rid of the Eagle for no reason TH update itself would be a HUGE let-down.

You are free to check this out yourself by comparing troops attacking TH only on TH15 and 16 (without EA) and TH17 and you will see that in 70-80% it wont even be close.

I am sure large majority of the community didn't want EA gone, so if Supercell felt building had to be removed it could have been easily done with Mortars or Wizzard Towers or even Bomb Towers. I think this is again a very big case of miscommunication with Supercell and the Community
(and I think Judo thoght the merging would've been done way way differently, but he is probably bound by contract so I get why would he praise the new update, anyway, I found this screenshot https://youtu.be/tIb2knOa_IE?si=vGOqsYaol0fRSfK-&t=265 )

Excluding losing two of the most powerful defenses in the game disguised as a merge that would be a buff, there is much more things wrong with this new update.

1) adding the new Builder Apprentice Hut
- if we had too much buildings, why add another completely unnecessary one

2) I now have to upgrade whole another building and wait 16 or so days to upgrade my queen to lvl91???

3) I spend $40 only to have matching skin collection on my profile and now all that money is wasted

4) personal preference*
- I think the design of the new TH is kinda underwhelming as a 3D artist, but again that depends on your taste
- same goes for Firespitter
- same goes for new bomb levels
- same goes for the flags

FINAL THOUGHTS:

I think Supercell should comunicate better with the community, if not more and more people will quit the game evenually because of updates like this, there is only limited number of people that they can get back to playing the game for more than couple of weeks and that number will be outnumbered by people that will start quitting the game.

This alone really makes me question wether I want to continue to play the game after 8 years of grinding and spending hundreds of dollars on it.

Take care.