Proposed gym overhaul
Some people including me, have complained taking gyms is too easy to the point it makes the gym meta irrelevant. The system is designed to give everyone who still plays 50 coins a day, it's not designed to be competitive in any way.
If this is the path Niantic choose, why not just scrap gym combat altogether? This would mean a valor player can add pokemon to a valor gym (same as now) but if a mystic appears they can put their pokemon in a gym and all the valors get kicked out immediately! That mystic would easily kick them out anyway, the only difference is it saves about 10 minutes of their time.
This seems good for all concerned.
Answers
That doesn't apply everywhere.
Anyway, this gym in my screenshot has been standing for 11 hours. This is actually quite rare here. But all the Pokemon are near full motivation. Yes, many people feed them berries.
Here, if a gym gets demotivated to even just 2/3 heart and nobody feeds berries, it will get attacked within minutes.
You always point out "That doesn't apply everywhere." Yes, we all know. But is you example the exception, or the rule? I just spent time in Puerto Rico, stopped at the Atlanta airport, the airport here in Minnesota, and now I'm here back home. Most of the gyms are what I describe. That shows a very flawed system. Even in your area, I wouldn't bother with gyms. Why waste my time battling a gym that just has people feeding berries to Pokemon constantly? Again, gym defending is about berries, not the strength of the pokemon.
Before the gym rework was released, I had initially thought that Niantic would keep some of the old gym system mechanics (prestiging would still be a thing, lvl 10 [ten people in gyms], CP maintenance rather than CP decay, collect 100 coins a day/5000 stardust) and revamp it with some of the mechanics of the gym system we have now, including only one of each Pokémon allowed in gyms, making gyms Pokestops, gym badges, Pokémon are arranged in gyms by the order in which people put their Pokémon rather than a CP hierarchy.
IMO, this kind of gym system would be pretty exciting, because you'll be battling Pokémon at that Pokémon's current level it is at rather than from lowest CP to highest CP, and you won't be fighting the same Pokémon over and over again like it was back then with Dragonite/Blissey towers. It was the CP decay factor of the current gym system that killed it for me, personally. It's CP decay that makes beating gyms too easy, and if CP decay weren't a thing, gym defenders would not only be more efficient in their roles, but more diverse, which was a problem with the old gym system. I guess what I'm trying to say is that Niantic could have figured out a way to integrate mechanics of both the old and current gym systems into one that may make the gym scene more interesting and "challenging", for lack of a better word.
Although your example is also not a competitive system, it saves time, ill give you that. Niantic needs to fix the gym system. Defenders worthless because of decay--> attackers arent needed (my team of furrets and raticates can take down any gym).
Attackers are only needed in raids so, unfortunately, right now the gym system is very very bad.
The gym rework was bad enough, but nearly the worst part is Golden Razz Berries. While I'm out in the freezing cold with numb fingers trying to badge up a gym, you're laying in bed under your electric blanket eating Flaming Hot Cheetos and remotely "defending." You want to defend? You should have to get your butt out here.
On combat merit alone, gyms already aren't worth it. Now remote-feeding GRB adds yet ANOTHER reason not to engage Niantic's deeply flawed gym system. Well done.
I am confident they will eventually get around to fix the gym system. They just need to develop a way that lets them make money from it. My bet is on modifiers or boosters to be slotted into the gym, which you can buy in the shop.
And they need to find a way to stop competitive players from destroying the game again. In the old gym system, these filled every gym with always the same defenders, with ever deteriorating variety. Gym defense consisted of making the fight as dull, time-consuming and pointless as possible. Attacking was minimized by widespread shaving. In the end, nobody attacked anymore as it was no fun in itself and the gym was always taken back within hours.
I also live in a high-turnover, competitive area and I can say that it's actually pretty annoying to take down gyms. If you're trying to defeat an enemy 3100 CP Blissey in a gym, it's virtually impossible to do it solo if the other player is actively defending with Golden Razz. It's also painfully boring to sit out in the cold battling the same Blissey dozens of times. On the other hand, the in-game notifications are so bad that you don't get time to react if someone is attacking your gym, making your efforts to take down a full-motivation gym amount to a handful of coins.
The gym system fails for different reasons in both active and inactive areas. Some hybrid system between both systems would probably work better; also it would be much better if we had control over when we could redeem our coins as opposed to waiting for Pokemon to get knocked out, like the old system.
Thanks to demotivation I took down 3 gyms in a row with 1 ttar. I used one hyper potion afterwards. Gold badges are the only thing that motivate me to keep going after gyms.
The coins are pretty easy to get here. The only time I've failed to get 50 was the day I flew back from China (after 3 weeks) and landed at 10:30pm (only got 6 coins). Sadly, I still had 1 mon left in a gym from before I left for my trip and it stayed there for 10 days after I got home.
I think that this system is great! Because of,
1- Spoofers: with the previous system spoofers prevented people for collecting their hard worked coins. You spent 3 hours walking and taking gyms before your collection time refreshed. By the time you had captured your gym number 10, your previous 7 had been retaken by a spoofer in 10 minutes. Niantic has made the gym system almost irrelevant for spoofers, so real players can actually get back now the hard-earned coins that were stolen from them in the old system.
2- Time: I loved to take down level 10 towers and prestige my level 10 gym spot, but I rarely had the time to do it. Or my phone battery would struggle to finish the task. Now, I can take down a gym if I have the time or keep walking if I'm in a rush and find a free spot somewhere else.
3- Diversity! Bored of battling the same pink pokemon over and over? Tired of seeing the same players in gyms everyday? We have a wide range of species to play with now! And trainer names are also to the rise.
4- Extra motivation: for some of us collecting gold badges brought back some sense of achievement that was lacking in the old system.
5- Extra items, very useful in areas with a limited numbers of pokestops. Linked to #4
I get that PoGo is missing a competitive aspect, and I'm looking forward to getting one such as PvP. By this point, I don't believe that competition may come from gyms (nor it should, IMO). We need a totally new competitive system of PvP (individual and by teams), monthly rankings, a Hall of the Fame, even including official competitions with prizes to the best qualified (like badges to show off, nothing big that gives a real advantage).