It's not that they're pocketing the SEO money. Of course that's not necessarily the case. The issue is that it's money that someone is having to spend to rank on G's search results pages. You may not consider this to be an expense that G is essentially forcing us to pay in order to play, but I sure as hell do. Sure, the money may not be directly going to G, but that's not the point. The point is that we still need to pay it. They are making SEO companies richer. You're correct. 100%. No dispute. However, they're doing it with our money.
I don't disagree, and I am onboard with both your understanding of these changes making sense. I, too, am a user of G services, and I can (and do) have an appreciation for how easy, effective, and efficient they make their search engine for me as a consumer. It's the reason I prefer G to Y, B, D, Ask, and all the others. I'm often impressed and relieved that my search queries can sometimes be answered without having to click through and sift through filler content, while hoping not to have to back out of a page to find somewhere else to sift through more fluff or those dreadful sites with pages that have a sentence or two and want you to continuously click through to page 50 to get your question answered. I get all that, and again, I'm onboard.
Where I disagree (to an extent, of course), is your
perfect world rhetoric about how when "
you want to rank you can provide worth while content and format it in a way that google likes". Sure, this sounds good, and it will work if your goal is to rank for the keyword:
twelve silvery sunsets over the ocean while eating potato chips. However, if your objective is to rank for keywords competitive enough to make your contributions worthwhile enough to compensate you for your investments spent, simply providing well-formatted, quality content won't get you to page 1 on it's own. Go start a new perfectly formatted website with amazing content centered around
payday loans, and please report back when you've organically reached page 1 for that keyword. I know there are much less restrictive longtail keywords you can rank for without any off page SEO and will bring in some traffic, but my point is that we, as website owners, often depend on search engines as a viable traffic source for bringing our targeted audiences to our websites. When the best search engine decides to enhance their service to the point to where its end users no longer need to click through, and while I do appreciate how easy they're making it for its users (as again, I am one of said users), it creates a disconnect.
I don't know what the solution is and I won't pretend to. But, I also will not pretend to not see the issue this causes. Even if it's not such a big deal, today, what happens a year from now? Three years? Five years? G will continue to evolve and none of us knows to what heights their evolution will reach and/or how much said evolution will exclude the livelihoods of the people who create the very content their algorithms are so ready to scrape and deliver straight from their platform.