I think that the whole thing they've written in that "Our Philosophy" paragraph was merely a dream. I think it's not completely fair to blame NCSoft for trying to make a profit with their product.
What we get is the result of the plague called "free 2 play". The market is pushing game publishers to go f2p because of the strong competition. If they won't go f2p they simple won't get enough players unless it's really popular brand. But even if they go f2p they still need to make enough money to pay the costs and make the profit. Because that's why they released the game in the first place.
But the cosmetics only won't motivate ppl to spend as much money as items that will actually push you through game progress or give you some kind of advantage. So you have to make a choice:
You can cut the costs of development and/or costs of running resulting in trash game. Or you can sell the "p2w" items to make more money.
Actually I think there are much bigger problems than P2W items.
1) The players can't trust what NCWest say about game changes.
- They've said that we would be able to exchange the white orbs, hm/cs resets and demon spirit stones for their new counterparts when they were going to remove them. Many players lost a lot of those because they've trusted what they said. The compensation for that mistake was a mockery because it was nowhere near the value of what ppl lost.
- They've promise that they would make sure to give players more than enough time in advance if they were going to remove badge exchane (see the quote below). Yet they only announced it in patch notes right before the patch. I don't mind the removal of exchange itself just the fact that they haven't let players know in time.
2) They treat some bugs as "working as intended".
For example the new AP achievement for hard mode DST, BC, WC dungs. The previous HM achievements counted runs retroactively and even this one counted the DST runs retroactively. Only BC/WC counter was bugged. Yet they annoucned that the achievement was not supposed to be retroactive.