SD nerf and TC fix were rather improvements, but it seems that improving other trollbuilds (220ac), limiting crafting while people often used all their blueprints on few chars, limiting bos/enclave stealing has made less people play the game.
Well, stealing from bos/enclave was indeed an exploit, I was able to get 300-400 super stims per hour from bos iirc. Too bad that there was nothing done about it for too long and some people made vast supplies of ss/5mm/mfc, the others just changed their playstyle "because SS are almost unlimited".