I'm an average player. I can't say recent or not so recent departures of top faf players have affected me negatively in any meaningful way. The fact of the matter is they do best what all other members of this community do: play the game. When they leave, another good player replaces them, tournaments don't stop happening entirely, there's just a drop in quality that's imperceptible to someone like me. Maybe if these players also happen to be amazing streamers or TDs, the impact of their departure is more palpable.
But devs are not like that. There isn't always someone to immediately replace them. I don't even know who it was that handled lobby server development before they left, but apparently nobody has filled their shoes a year or more after the fact and development on features that require such a person has stopped entirely. Such departures affect me a lot more, since basically all of the best features to have come about in the last few years have relied on very few key individuals being motivated enough to implement them. And they don't just affect me, they affect every player, no matter their rating.
I wouldn't trade TMM or mapgen or 20% sim speed for 1000 2500+ rated players because I wouldn't be playing faf today without people like Ze_PiLoT, in spite of all the pros that had already stopped playing before he stopped developing. The ideal would be to have good communication and understanding between both groups, but sometimes it seems like each are focused on different goals and no amount of communication can fix that - what's needed instead is compromise. And when such compromise is not offered, I would urge you, devs, to consider ignoring feedback that's not constructive to your goals, before you consider halting your contributions or leaving.
As for features where gameplay and balance overlap, I would urge both the dev and balance teams to consider that yes, this is an RTS game and micro is important, but what's very specifically different about this particular RTS should be emphasized. I think the flow economy is one example, but a more relevant one to recent conversations is the focus on the big decisions and away from accurate micro evident by the unprecedented level of automation (at the time) the original devs went to great lengths to implement.