I think the real point is rather users knew or not or utilized the feature (Yes it's a feature and I refuse to acknowledge that is was an "exploit) TNT made some horrible decisions during this process;
Chose to remove it after a year and a half of it being there.
Remove the skip quest button and claim it had nothing to do with said feature even though it CLEARY DID (who would skip a quest if going for an item was your only choice? Yeah, exactly.)
Remove it abruptly with no announcement or explanation as to WHY this was the case.
Lie to multiple users, THOUSANDS, in tickets stating it was a "site bug" and being worked on and would be fixed.
Then turn around and essentially call the entire community cheaters by using an "exploit".
I've seen many users give their opinion on this topic but I think my favorite so far and honestly the most accurate about how I feel is that so many of us have stuck around with Neopets through the years, we stayed through a broken/laggy site, the NFT fiasco, other horribly mismanaged decisions, paying and supporting a site we love in hopes that it would stay around because we cared about it. The least they could do is respect us. So many of us have put hundreds to thousands of dollars into this site through premium & purchase of NC to keep it alive and support it and they want to turn around and call us exploiters and lie straight to our faces? Nuh uh.
I've always been pretty big on support for TNT and think that some people can be too hard. So many people complained about the items in the Quest Log deflating their mass hoarded collection of items that they purposefully inflated to make a profit. Then you got people complaining about premium exclusive prizes in events or that event prizes are too OP and "you poooors are getting items you were never meant to have.". I found that all ridiculous. What TNT WAS doing was trying to fight the snipers/inflators and make some stamps, items or collectibles more obtainable and it was working! It was actually helping the inflation. It still took some work, logging in everyday, sometimes even having to buy the rest of the Weekly Streak prize items in the pool to get everything you wanted. I was still spending 2m+ on stamps here and there toward the end of the rotation, so people were still making a profit, but I wasn't sinking 200m per stamp. However, lying and straight up insulting the community is NEVER okay. Especially when so many of us loyal players have been around despite people leaving and other people's backlash.