I don't really use gold except for advisors and I don't think there's really a big problem with the game as it is rn. I'll give you a few reasons:
1. Players spending gold does not prevent you from dodging troops or sniping CSs. All it does it give them extra troops to use, or a second CS attempt if your first one failed.
2. Gold can't really stop a siege break. As long as you time attacks to land shortly after the CS, you can kill it very quickly. You don't even need to snipe the CS necessarily, as long as you have enough alliance members sending attacks.
3. Gold still takes time to use. People seem to think that gold lets you just spam attacks out constantly and makes it impossible to siege anyone. The truth is, any time you build troops you're limited by your warehouse and resources. Without rss, you can't build troops. So in order to gold up a nuke, you first need to send rss to the city, which could take anywhere from 1 to 20 minutes, depending on how far away you are. Since a full nuke often requires multiple full warehouses to build, you'd probably need to do this another 3-6 times (with just a level 20 ari in your city and no other bonuses, you need 5 full warehouses for 300 LS, or 6 for a decent nuke). And before anyone tries to mention golding the rss, the gold trade takes 20 minutes. Once all the units are done and ready, you still need to send it to the siege. And depending on that, it could still take you anywhere from 20 mins to 1 hour based on the TT. This means that, yes, while instant golding does save a lot of time, trying to gold up a nuke could still take up to 1-2 hours between each attempt, and the more you gold the more rss you'll need to spend.
Now I want to touch up on that little remark you made talking about "using bots to cheat the anti-timer". For this we need a little bit of math:
When you time an attack, the anti timer will either add 10 seconds to the TT, or subtract 10. This means that there are 21 possible times that the timer could give you (10 times "behind" the prediction, 10 times "in front" of the prediction, or give you the actual predicted tme which would be +0). This then means that if you are aiming for one specific time (let's say the same second as the CS), you have a 1 in 21 chance of getting that time you want as long as you time the support within the timer window. The timing window is also 21 seconds long btw, since if you send the support 10 seconds before the CS, you have a 1 in 21 chance of getting +10 on the anti timer.
Now, since you can recall support right after you send it, this means that if you're quick, you can send and recall support several times within this window to try and get the perfect time. Assuming you can send, check the landing time and recall in 4 seconds (which, if you have decent internet, is not an issue), that means that you can potentially get 5 attempts at it. to figure out your chances of ONE city being able to get the perfect time after 5 attempts, you simply need to use this equation:
100 * (1 - ( 1- (1/21))^5) = 21.65%.
So, using this method, you might be able to get 1 out of every 5 cities to land on the perfect time that you want!
However, some people are definitely faster. If you have good internet and are quick with the mouse, you can even reach 6 or 7 attempts each time on support. Just going from 5 attempts to 6 raises each city's chances of hitting the perfect time all the way up to 25.38%! That's 1 out of every 4.
Finally, let's address what "skill" means in this game. I think I can confidently say, without any objections, that the number 1 thing that determines who a good or bad player is is activity. The less active you are, the more likely you are to be caught offline, and thus sieged. Staying active also means you don't waste resources, you build troops and ships constantly, and you keep up to date with everything going on in your alliance. More importantly, you're there for your team when they plan something, or someone tries to CS them. If you're offline and your teammate needs help, you are harming your team.
The second biggest thing that determines how "good" a player is is merely how good they are at timing and sniping. At the end of the day, sniping is just simple math, and the only thing that's going to stop you from perfectly sniping or timing everything is internet. Bad internet = server lag, which can be the difference between losing a city and killing a CS. If you are having trouble with either of these, it's either because you have terrible internet, or you're just not putting enough effort in.