I got passed the bt/aransu softcap back in the beginning of the year. The way I did it was, make a class that everyone needs, and then aggressively farm multiple characters every day for months and months, not missing a single day. 20 moonstone here, 40 there, etc. I started as a gunner and it was absolute hell. People trash talking me every day, raids impossible to find because my gear was low and gunners are supposed to have good gear to keep up with the rest. I re rolled to warden, and things got a lot better. So i finally found raids, and that is a few hundred gold a week starting off. I would literally just buy tradable mats like moonstones and soulstones and just count the gold loss as a good cause. It actually really helped to reroll and get a raid and then use that raid money for mats. It helped me catch up.
If you expect to get GC9 in a month from scratch, I think you are sorely misguided. First you need to make some alts, and that will take 1-2 weeks, and you need to gear up your main to at least a6 or a9, with a true cosmic soul. That's going to take you at least a month or two. Plus you need to learn raid and dungeons mechs, then you can finally get a TT raid or save up for your mat. You need to make friends and be a likable person to get any carry favors and boosting as well. If you're not a likable person, and you play an unwanted class, good luck, because you'll need to make alts and farm your way solo in f8 for months until you get anywhere. The only way to get past this soft cap is to do this stuff. And sad to say, it's only the 1st soft cap. Because once you reach mid tier soul/heart, and GC, you're stuck there most likely, and will never reach max soul/pet and thorn breaker 6 with 330 crit dmg. That tier of players if reserved for the top 5 ladder and gold buyer players.
Ncsoft is releasing their new patch today and it's going to make things exponentially harder to reach any of this. The game will die. NCsoft will refuse to take the blame, because it's more of a problem they couldn't control at first with the extremely elitist community, gold sellers that destroy equal progression, account buyers and sellers, and other shady and toxic stuff happening. But at this point, ncsoft has a huge part of the reason this game will die. Most of the players quit already, and we're down to half a server. Ncsoft isn't listening to the remaining playerbase that's full of the people who loved this game the most and were willing to stick through this struggle. They keep lowering gold, lowering chances for good rng, making things more expensive, just generally being greedy and making everything harder for the f2p players. It's only my guess that they do this to balance their massive profits loss, by attempting to milk as much money from the trove casino gamblers as they can, before this ship sinks. The end isn't coming, the game isn't failing. The end is here and it has failed.