For the record, I do have large Moonstone farms in both cities and I love them. My problem is how do you define "fairness" in an open-ended game with no concrete objectives? It's a vague target that is very difficult to hit and completely subjective. Some people want to be #1 on the charts for everything there are charts for, while others just like pretty buildings. Some want to race through all the chapters while others are content living in chapter 5 forever. If competition is your thing, you can be a chap 19 city competing against a fresh chap 1 city in the same rankings so how is that ever fair to begin with? And now, even depending on when you started the game, two cities in the same chapter might not even have the same tech tree! You can play the game while completely ignoring fellowships, Spire, tournaments, magic academy, events, and fellowship adventures. So where and how do you draw the line on fairness? How is 2 Moonstone sets any more fair than 1 set compared to someone who has 8 sets or whatever?
I do think they are making good changes on this front in terms of letting new players get buildings from the past, but parity and fairness will never be reached in an open-ended game. For example, I started after the original Phoenix event. For awhile, if you missed an event, that was that. No Fire Phoenix for you (imagine trying to compete in tourneys without one). Then they started letting you craft bases for evolve buildings from events you missed. Hooray for useless lvl 1 bases you can't ever evolve! Then they started putting artifacts in the Spire, and then Magic Academy too. And now they introduced Tomes that lets you pick artifacts or buildings from past events too. On the CC front, there are now 2 different sets (Pilgrim and Forbidden Ruins) that give CCs. You can win more Tomes to add to more than one set (the upcoming FA supposedly will give a Tome that lets you pick out a Forbidden Ruins building). So if you missed the chance at multiple Moonstone sets and care about CCs, this is the pursuit you should be prioritizing then. I'm now acquiring 3 more CCs from the sets, 2 from Pilgrim's Manor (shoutout to
@Ihrlaen for the assist!) and 1 from Forbidden Ruins set, on top of my Moonstones. Moonstones were won in the past via effort in the Spire, but nobody was forced to climb it. Making us work to acquire more Forbidden Ruin and Pilgrim pieces to gain more CCs daily is very similar to how Moonstone used to be acquired. People who want the CCs are making conscious efforts to attain more pieces while others may not put together the importance of CC to put themselves in position to win more. For example, if you know you can win another piece in the upcoming FA and you
really want it, but are currently playing in a casual FS that can't finish all 3 paths in the FA, well that player has some in-game decisions to make, starting with deciding if they're in the right-fitting fellowship. They have free will to make whatever decision they want between now and the start of FA. If they choose NOT to act, well, that's fine, but some of us will work towards getting a 4th CC from Pilgrim/Forbidden Ruin sets and the gap between the haves and have nots continue to widen.