I am aware that I can upgrade some sort of cheap deck to challenge expert difficulty, that's not the point. Heck, there were enough (sometimes rather tedious) guides about beating expert difficulty with the basic F2P deck around 10 years ago.
The thing is: I have no interest to spend my limited time playing a makeshift deck I don't enjoy for months, in order to get access to the cards I used to play with - especially not with several upcoming resets!.
Your motivation probably differs from mine, but I mainly came back for the nostalgic experience. You know, having fun, playing the deck I used to with other players. Instead I am looking at months of doing dailys to get even a part of my collection back. In short: If you had an extensive collection back then, the current playing experience is a lot worse than the original.
Now, if you personally enjoy building up your collection over a rather long period of time, challenging yourself to use only easy to acquire cards while doing so and playing the auction house, that's fine with me. But I certainly do not intend to spend my time by checking the auction house 3 times a day or start spamming the trade chat all day long in order to maybe save 100BFP, so I have to do one daily quest less. For me personally, that's not what Battleforge is about.
And even though I barely played PVP, I feel sorry for the people who just want to relive the PVP experience. Back in the day, you spent money and bought the cards for your PVP deck with BFP, had to grind out the upgrades (which took long enough if your focus was PVP) and were good to go.
Currently, before you can even start a fair PVP match, you look at a rather extensive period of farming cards and upgrades.
I will admit that the aspect of collecting cards is part of the game. I am certainly not asking to hand out a complete card collection on the 1st day.
But how many people do you think will be happy to go through the unlocking process several times after each reset? In my opinion, the dev team is misguided if they believe making the acquisition of cards more tedious will automatically be beneficial for the playerbase.
Eventually, all players will have a complete collection anyway and at that point card prices will radically drop, because of an overabundance of available cards.
In my opinion, the longtime success of the game will depend on the creativity of the community and not on the question if people will have to grind a few more months for their collection.
If you really wanted to keep players interested longer by restricting access to cards, it might be better to spread out the release of the different card editions over time (while reducing booster prices). If I understand correctly, that's what Blizzard is doing with WOW classic: Not give access to all raids right away, but unlock them over time, so people can look forward to some "new" content.