Zeelot and TMO officers are playing the server and GMs for fools - again! This "punishment" is nothing but a small part of an elaborate plot to solidify their standing as the server's most powerful entity, and to set their dominance for Velious and beyond. Not only was this orchestrated and carried out with the full consent and knowledge of the guild leaders, but every single detail of the plan, including researching prior GM intervention and the scope of punishment for such crimes, was meticulously laid out.
You may be asking, "Why would they do something that is going to hurt their reputation and ability to acquire 15-year-old pixels? Why wouldn't they just keep carrying on and BIS-gearing out their 7th alts to ensure utter domination of Velious?
Frankly, it's because the leadership knew the direction in which the opinion of the GMs and the player base was going - that this monopolization of content would not stand for much further, especially with the magnum opus of the server so close to launch: Velious. And their prediction played out perfectly. Rogean's message to the server proved this. And all they had to do was dupe some platinum to set off the chain reaction.
How does this help TMO in the long run? Consider the new threads in Server Chat which are gaining rapid and widespread support. The threads about sharing raid mobs and giving all guilds a chance to get some pixels. TMO leadership knew this would be the first and most likely ultimate response of the player base, and knew they could capitalize on it. The plan is simple: divide and conquer.
With the heat off of the main guild (which will likely be disbanded to perpetuate the farce - hence why the reputation hit everyone keeps talking about won't even matter), the TMO entity would still be able to maintain dominance of all content on P99. This ploy is nothing new: the world has seen it before in the form of satellites of the USSR and US during the cold war, "shell" companies that remove the technicality of a monopoly in business, and horizontal integration of supply chains. The split has been underway for a while now - see, for example, recent TMO collaborations with Europa, Taken, and Azure Guard. It's only a matter of time before the people with excellent raid-leadership experience rise to the top of these satellite guilds.
This is genius masterminding at its best. Just look at RnF over the past 16 hours to see how much attention has been diverted from their plan. Everyone is so caught up in talking shit and the "I told you so" rhetoric that no one has any idea that they are playing directly into TMO's filthy hands.
Lastly, why did they choose a platinum dupe as a catalyst for this revolution? Because the added bonus of the duping scheme was that if, for some reason they were not caught, they would have a ton of PP to help further their plan. It's win-win, and it's damn effective.