It is not to be a lazy pirate, they just downgraded the bot-Island about 400%, an lvl 41 bot dropped from 306 to 76 per hour, so the bots are not producing enough resources anymore. The coincidence is that is happen shortly before they introduced the new etching Upgrades (expensive Upgrades) to make more money.
For 550 etching you get 5% more lumber, 550 etching cost you 5500 rubies (at least) and if you make 4000 lumber per hour than you gain 200/h extra or 1752000 a year or you buy 30k lumber for 40 rubies a Piece, in sum 5480 rubies and you get 4110000, if you play less than 2.35 year then buying lumber is your friend. Upgrading lumber and rum cost you 1100 and you can only 1000 at the best package hmmm coincidence.
Weird is also, all that happen after RuAL bashed a couple big BH and now they need resources to rebuild their ships but unfortunately the resources has been etched ahhh downgraded. Maybe they spend more real money.
I have suggestion to make more money: buying a letter-increaser for $9.99 to fix the letter bug for one month, this would be great. Long live the letter bug.
Maybe the best thing is to quite the game, as long as is still free.