Looking back...

You are right, golden berry feeding needs a nerf.

But you are limited to feeding 10 different Pokémon in 30 minutes. If a few of your gyms are attacked at the same time you are helpless to defend it. But odds are, after you got your coins you are unlikely to defend it so strongly and they can come smash a demotivated gym easily.

I’m not a fan of the new system but its better in some ways but worse in others.

Whoever said that the new system was friendlier to newer players was spouting bullshit.

Back under the old gym system, it took no effort for me, as a level 20+, to find a level three or four gym with one or no Blisseys and receive ten coins for the day, all with less than 15 minutes of effort. Under this new system, the only way for any lower level solo player to receive coins is to get lucky and find a gym that other people on their team took over beforehand.

Shaving and sniping are even more common under the new system, simply because once a gym changes colour, all remaining slots are free and there is no prestiging. I actually miss prestiging Blissey towers, which would be easier (and more fun) with all the legendaries that we have now.

The situation is probably different in rural areas, where GRB feeding is completely unnecessary and players have to shave themselves off for coins.

At 5:30AM, very few trainers are awake to feed berries.

As someone who's been gym'ing since day one of the game's release, I can say that I do miss elements of the old gym system, and that the new system certainly has it's flaws. Gold razz feeding is definitely one of them, and there's nothing worse than when you have players with multiple accounts in the same gym who can effectively gold razz the gym indefinitely.

That said, the old system was brutal in it's own ways as well, and the barrier to entry was probably a bit too high for newer/lower level trainers. In the current system, sans GR, any gym can be taken down after a handful of hours by even the most mediocre of attacking teams. Sure, GR feeding will deter many lower level attackers, but luckily not everyone is keeping an eye on their gyms at all times.

In the old system, a lvl 10 tower full of Blissey, Snorlax, and maybe some Dragonite, was an absolute nightmare to a newer/lower level player. Without help, they didn't stand a chance. Forget waiting for a few hours for the gym to decay (because there was no decay); it was more like "come back and try again in a few weeks when you've leveled up several times and powered things up considerably."
Even the higher level trainers with top-tier Mons might spend 30-40mins trying to take down a lvl 10 tower with strong defenders in it.

As a result, often times I would see tower gyms that would go untouched for lengthy periods of time, either because trainers didn't want to spend that long battling a single gym, or they literally didn't have the firepower to defeat it. I'm on the underdog team in my area (Instinct) and even I would sit in gyms sometimes for weeks at a time in the old system. My record time in one gym was seven months. While the new system, again, is far from perfect, at least it has me interacting with gyms more frequently, there's more turnover, and a larger number of players battling.

TL;DR: The new system isn't perfect. It needs tweaks and GR feeding needs to get nerfed, but I don't think we should ever go back to the old system. Because as a whole, it was much, much more brutal.

I think it’s best to just admit that Singapore has one of the most hardcore (GRB feeding) gym scenes in the world.

The old gym system provided more depth to the game and was more competitive. In my opinion, level 5 shouldn't be able to compete with level 40 players like in the new gym systrm. This new gym system sucks donkeykong bells. Niantic only came up with this new gym system, because of their shortcomings fighting spoofers.

Looking back, two things I can point out as my reason to back off my activity. One are raids, but second was the new gym system.

-> And this answer is even coming from a player who was dominated in its area by other colors back in the days. So dont start telling me I didn't fight endless hours against those Blissey towers and spoofers randomly at nights.

Niantic banning people when providing evidence? The chances are larger for you to win the lottery

You are not supposed to be able to take down any gym at any time at will. Remote feeding of the golden razzberry sees to that. A GRB fight can be fun in its own way: A while ago just before lunch I took down a gym that had been standing for two days, all defenders at zero motivation. I had barely moved out of range when one of its former inhabitants took it back. I had time enough and so I decided not to take this. I went back and fought his stupid Blissey. Four times he managed to slip in a golden razzberry between the second and third round. I varied my pattern, sometimes starting a minute late, sometimes taking my time during a fight, all in order to break his pattern. Finally, in the fifth attack he was too slow and I kicked him out and placed my own defender. A Blissey, of course, this guy did not deserve something fun. For act 2 I kept the gym open on my phone, ready to feed at a moments notice. Sure enough, after just ten minutes he tried again. After feeding just two times he gave up. But I knew he would be back. So I kept the gym open further, keeping it in me field of view irregardless of what I was doing. He tried again half an hour later, and three more times after that. Each time my razzberries fended him off. I played with the timing again, sometimes feeding after the first fight already, to break any pattern he might try. Only in the evening did I let him take down the gym.

This is more of an issue for Rural/Suburban players than Urban players because in Urban area's, there are usually 2 more gyms within walking distance that you can go to. This is rarely the case in Rural or Suburban environments, so the GR defense is enraging out there. (I ran into it last X-mas when I was visiting family in rural environments.)

The way I look at it, I'm pumping up my stats, getting more Gym and regular XP, and generally I'm getting enough Potions and Revives to make the time Item-Neutral. (ie: I end with as many Items as I started with) And I can stagger things up by not attacking for a few minutes, making the GR defender think I've given up, then start again and force them to come back to defending the gym - I do this regularly when I run into a GR defender, and almost half the time it works because they have stopped watching that gym after I paused. So I give it about 10 min of attacking a gym before I finally stop - usually I do 3 attacks, see how the GR is being used, then stagger my next attacks out until either I win or they show they're very stubborn in defense. Either way, I'm coming out ahead; it's just one way I'm more ahead than the other way.

They're both bad in different ways, unfortunately. Against a max or near-max Blissey, it's impossible for one attacker to take it down if there's one person actively defending. I typically walk away as soon as I see someone berrying because it's not worth trying to berry-cap them. On the other hand, I definitely get more coins under this system than I ever did under the old system (admittedly at a lower level), where I could only maintain spots in one or two gyms at a time before getting shaved out. There are more gyms now and more often than not I can find times to attack gyms where they're not getting defended or they're so low motivation that defenders can't respond. For reference I live in an active metro area with generally high turnover.

As I’ve said before, rather than completely overhauling the gyms, they just needed to tweak them by putting in the “one species per gym” limitation, and adding the time delay to prevent sniping.

Prestiging provided a whole different dimension to the game which I miss.