Appologies for inconvinience. Just wanted to explain soething. It's a bit strange to me, and always was, that you consider breaking through all 4 vicious as something of an achievement, considering how much of an obstacle they are is more related to the lack of info on resources than any "footwork" skill cap. Once stuff is on the wiki, everyone'll be able to do it. If you're not sure - remember the q3 vid? Not a day after, a self-admitted newbie's beat NL simly off of info he was missing and found there.
What I assume is that the game is going to be played for a long time by a variety of people. I've seen it with games, I've known several complete non gamers, housewives, who latched onto games like tetris variants and played them as a way to unwind for years and years. There's more of that these days then 20 years ago. There isn't really any need to chalk off post-endgame as "something few people will be able / willing to do". This is that kind of game - one that I'll be playing 20 years from now, and I've already dropped every other game in favour of it, pretty much.
EDIT: The qoute in HARD GT is right: "this is where the real game starts". Except your locker gets clogged, so the quote would be more right if it said: "this is where you grind 200 000 gold, and take forever to do it and then the real game starts, only you have 2 functional locker slots unless you clog those up too".
Your game might be better and more interesting than what you're giving it credit for
It's deffinitely not as hard as you think, and we are deffinitely less skilled (I am) than you assume - it's just that creating artificial difficulty worked too well concerning a few things. What we are saying - you don't need to inflate the time it takes to become a vet anymore. You can deffinitely do without time mandatory to explore content and combo's - would make even vet feedback more sensible, for one thing. The game is infinitely replayable, and what makes some parts not as enjoyable can be remedied without hurting anything else.