I can understand that some accounts have bad luck with their pulls but most people like to play the game in an awful way thinking that there isn't going to be consequences in the long run and they also think that they are entitled to beat everything in game with their bad choices.

Most of the rant from people screaming "Powercreep" comes from 2 things:

1) from the players with 1 of the 2 worst mindsets that can be used to play a live service gacha game, or even worse... the 2 of them combined.  

First Mindset - The Pixel Collector: generally they only pull for characters that they like but the issue is that they like almost all characters so they do not prepare their pulls most of the time. Also they most of the time avoid like hell vertical investment (Signature Lightcones & Eidolons).

Second Mindset - The Meta Chaser: Generally they pulls only for characters that a tierlist consider as the most broken at that point in time while discard their previous ones if for some reason they lose performance in their eyes.

Both mindsets bring to ruin the account progress because they split resources so thin each time that they pick a new character.

2) from fallacy ideas with absurd limits that they put themselves from who the hell knows.

First wrong Idea: The 5\* character is only valid at E0 or E0S1, anything above it is not fair & relatable. (Insert Facepalm meme here). The limit of a character since day one has been E6S5, doesn't mean you have to get it right away but that is the true limit per character.

Second wrong Idea: The old 5\* character should no be able to be paired in a team composition with newest 5\* characters in future content to keep his old performance (Mostly said about the DPS). (Insert You serious meme here). A team is form of 4 character and you can pair anyone that have synergy between them, that is one way of building progress in your account.

Third wrong Idea: Anything below 0 cycle in MoC, 80000 points in PF and 8000 poins in AS is garbage. Flexing doesn't give you anything in game. 10 Cycle in Moc or less, 6000 points in PF or more and 6600 points or more in AS are good and enough.

Fouth wrong Idea: That you have to pull adn win everything. Always expect that you will lose the 50/50 or the 75/25 when you consider obtaing anything, so first save enough resources to secure the result regarless of what happen.

This post come from a player with a F2P Account that has beaten each endgame content released since patch 1.3 day one ("Moc, PF, AS" 98% of the time without any issue), without a big roster of characters. The only content that started as a true challege for my account is the Anomaly Arbitration.

Powercreep? or Skill Issues.