Throwing in my 2 cents... first up, I just want it to be said that balancing a real world economy is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, even with thousands of people working together. Managing a Virtual one is no less difficult, simplified as it may be, its still prone to drastic shifts and unpredictability.
The biggest issue i think we can all agree stemmed from the emerald to diamond conversion. It should be noted that in 1.8, this was a healthy, necessary villager trade that had a truly positive effect on the economy. Before the inclusion of mending, there was no way around eventually having to replace armor and tools, god gear came and went quickly because it all sooner or later was unable to be repaired. There was a much higher need for diamonds for personal use. So naturally in going forward for 1.9 the trade was kept. Nobody had any idea how drastically mending would effect the vanilla experience and the inflation of diamonds. The diamond trade wasn't a blatent mistake made by staff completely ignoring players as a fair few seem to think, it was an existing trade that had worked well for some time that felt natural to move into the next update.
In hindsight, mending really messed up the economy. What I dont understand is why everyone thinks pumpkin / crop farms are issues. I have a farmer villager in my base that actually has a better deal on carrots than the villager in spawn, and hes got a 10 pumpkin / melon per emmy trade as well, and thats straight vanilla, Emeralds are meant to be easy to come by. I realize this compounds the problem set by the emerald to diamond trade, but the farms themselves arent an issue whatsoever. The argument also can't be made that having personal access to villagers is too OP. While the 1.11 change to zombie spawners certainly makes access to zillagers much more difficult, this is a problem unique to Craftymynes, as mob griefing is off, if it were on like in a standard survival world, villagers would be stupid easy to breed, even with the 1.11 update. Even all things considered, with enough time, its still relatively easy to breed villagers and create your own market.
But enough with the econony problems, we all know they're there and we're basically repeating ourselves, we need to focus on our options.
Everyone seems to be clamoring for a map reset but that introduces a policy issue. Players need to be reassured to some degree that another map reset isnt just around the corner with every update. Thjs map isnt even that old, it was just created in february or march if i remember correctly. Just to clarify, Id be okay with a map reset, Id wager I have one of the larger bases on the server and having to start over would be fine. But I think we should look to other online gaming economies for a solution.
My personal reccomendation for a fix would not be a map reset, or a diamond wipe, but a currency conversion / payout and then eliminate the jeweler villager altogether. World of warcraft has done this frequently in the past with marks of honor / honor points / arena points. They changed the currency and coverted everyones existing "old currency" to the current market equivalent in gold coins.
Now it would work for us like this. Admins and Crafty would determine an acceptable base limit on diamond. Say 20 diamond blocks for the sake of example. Any players with more than that would be stripped of any and all excess and paid a conversion of emeralds... think imminent domain here. FOr the good of the server were taking all your excess diamonds away, but youll be paid fairly in emeralds for them.
This is the most fair and least invasive way to "reset" the server economy. It doesnt call for a complete map reset, and there isnt a massive disparity of inconvenience based on how long youve been playing. IF you have less than that 20 diamond block limit when the "imminent domain payout" happens, you wont even be affected. If youve amassed like 900 diamond blocks, youll be paid their worth in emeralds. Likewise if youve only got 100 diamond blocks, you be paid less emeralds, but the same rate as everyone else.
This would not damage the economy or start it off unequally whatsoever, as emeralds are easy as hell to come by in vanilla already and are meant to be available in these quantities, the people who have so many diamonds have that many because they farmed that many emeralds available to them in a vanilla setting. They would have that many emeralds had the diamond conversion never existed.
From the buyout point onwards, remove the jeweler altogether. From there, it could then be decided whether or not to revert all spawners back to normal or not but i feel thats another issue altogether.
This makes more sense than a reset. If we reset youll lose all your diamonds, gear, building progress anyways. This way everyone gets to keep their bases and gets compensated equally and fairly based on their current level of wealth.