How's this for a hot take: I think GT Sport has a broken economy and GT7 has a more well designed economy that will prove to be a better gaming experience once all the events are in.
When did you ever have to think about spending money on cars in GTS except if you wanted one of the 20 million credit unicorns? You didn't. That's poor game design.
In GT7 on the other hand you can afford to buy regular street cars with little thought, you can buy regular race cars selectively (gr4/3), you can buy pricier race cars (gr1/2, those race winner cars that are more expensive like the DBR9 or the Ford GTs) if you save up some money. And you have to buckle down and grind for unicorns.
That's how things should be. Sport mode pays too little (this is getting fixed) and the max payouts for events is a bit low right now but this is also getting fixed. More importantly we will get events for cars that currently have none, like Gr2s and Gr1s, or formats like endurance races.
GT7s economy is better than GT Sport's.
Not a 'hot take' at all, it's a request to judge a titles economy on what we
may get, rather than what we have right now. The fundamental flaw with that is we can't time travel.
A balanced economy, for both now and the future, would see players able to afford the majority of the content in game by completing the curated single player content in it's entirety. PD already know this is a fundament gameplay unlock loop, because they use it for track locations, you unlock the very last track location when you complete the very last GT Cafe Menu! If you want to really push it, say players have to dupe some of the events, say half of them again. You then add new events as you add new track locations and cars to the title, that way the in-game economy keeps pace with the total content (both tracks and cars).
It's really not that complicated at all, and as I have already outlined, PD knows this, but they picked a different route, resulting in an absurd grind for car content, and then they doubled down on it. Positive changes only came when the player base said 'enough is enough', and even then we don't yet know how they will be implemented or if they will be well implemented!
Now, for whatever reason GT7 released with far too little to do once the Menu's were finished, with far too little reward for doing the light amount of curated content, now this is not complicated stuff to add, hell they could have designed a revised UI for the curated single-player content from GTS and carried it over wholesale (it's not as if that isn't what they have historically done) and it would have resulted in a better balanced economy. Any economy that requires you to "buckle down and grind" is fundamentally not well balanced.
So no, it's easily demonstrable that not only is GT7's in-game economy not well balanced at all, but it's far less balanced that GTS's was at it's end of life, and that should have been the minimum jumping off point for GT7.