is using a Ralph loop for all tasks with "claude -p" and using my weekly limit up to 100% considered some kind of unprofitable outlier? It's a command line tool, it would be ridiculous to expect that a large number of users don't do this. I never launch "claude" interactively by itself.

My understanding is that now with this workflow I will pay the same amount but get much less usage before getting to 100% for the week. How is that not bad?

They've probably (rightfully) identified long horizon autonomous development isn't quite there yet, so most stuff created by forcing Claude to run until you hit 100% of your weekly limits is going to be relatively low value slop that will not convert to long-term sticky spend/usage vs someone actively steering Claude until they hit their limit.

If anything you might be an outlier if you do this and are actually producing something of reasonable value down the line.

They know if the value provided by subsidized usage is too low, they're literally burning dollars for nothing: people won't feel any great pain losing it one day and definitely won't convert.