No disrespect taken. 
It’s a reasonable perspective given the current state of things.
Virgo however isn’t an option right now because the automated graduation feature doesn’t work anymore. Given that, and that MW is now reserved for non-newbs, Infinitum for all its flaws is better than nothing.
I don’t blame anybody for thinking it wasn’t thought through, because you guys can’t read my mind. However, it would be more productive to ask questions than to assume that I’m not giving thought to these matters. 
A few things worth noting:
This new feature, Galactic Event: Planet Death, is going to be a game-wide feature. For years, top players who enjoy being on top haven’t had to do a whole lot of work to stay there, and that is a problem.
It may be demotivating for the top players, but for everybody else it already is demotivating that top players are largely untouchable. I’m perfectly fine making top players have to work to maintain their rank, even if it makes them uncomfortable.
If they’re skilled enough, they will maintain their rank despite the challenge. If they’re not, then whoever takes their place deserves it more.
The decision to not delete inactives was announced 2 years ago when we first started discussing Infinitum. This isn’t a new feature. The entire point of Infinitum is that once you join, your empire will always be there.
Infinitum obviously isn’t perfect, but there’s a long term vision that we should keep in mind when we consider the short term problems.
It’s easy to say that Virgo was better, and all of us can dream up ideas all day long about what the perfect newbie galaxy would look like.
We don’t have a lack of solutions, we have a lack of dev resources. In the short term, we’ll work with what we have.