It's more philosophical than anything as implementing something that would hurt the player-base I always feel is bad and punishing players is not the way to go, ever. Like in your example they punished players and I personally would have opened up new hometowns without blocking Galadon and allowed the players to pick but perhaps gave incentives to joining other hometowns.
I personally feel that players who get butthurt about rewarded characters tend to be the type to multichar a lot. My personal problems is this. The part I don't like, while action is in PK is a real drive for a lot of players in CF, is the fairweather play. When you don't invest your time playing a character, you don't get rewarded and complain about jack blaguar because they spent 300 hours on one char while you spent 300 hours on 5 characters. Multicharing is usually abused through things like, oh I'm logged on to my lowbie and see hero person I wanna kill then switch to your hero and try and kill them, which to me feels super OOC.
I feel that multicharing hurts more because then you have more rage deletes because people don't invest, when if you stuck it out like say the Emperor who probably gets full looted each time he dies, sticks about, kills and gets his shit back each time and keeps trucking. In a sense the IMMs tend to give incentives to players who stick out a character and doesn't rage delete after losing 3 con and honestly, how many of you want to be compared to funnyone and his 50 hour heros who delete after dying a few times?
I personally think that CF would be enjoyed more if people played their characters like a relationship. When you love it, you play more of it, when you start to dislike it you try to rekindle the love, and if you get sick of it then go onto the next. I have days where I think "I'm tired of this character and want to quit" but stick it out and find new meaning or enjoyment in the character and I think we would have more fun if the 20 hero's all logged in at the same time then having 7 heros, 3 lvl 40's, 10 lvl 20-30's and a few pre 11s.