I remember I had a system that would train Mining, Smithing, Crafting, Magic and Runecrafting just by alching ruby bracers that I got all the materials for (except the rubies) by myself.

My brothers and I would use the RS Gold trick of merchanting empty glass vials from an NPC and selling them to the global player exchange where there was a nice healthy profit. Would make 150K an hour, which was quite a lot back then.

Yeah, when things such as the Gold Memberships roll back around, as they just recently have, the prices of Bonds rose from ~6.5m gp to over 10m gp. People that stocked up would have made a tidy profit from that.

An added point is that the game has also struggled heavily with bots who mass-harvest resources to sell for real world money, further adding to the pool of resources that the high-alch spell can convert into gold.

Bonds were in part introduced to offer a legal means of trading real world money for in-game currency and vice versa, and is a two-birds-one-stone solution to inflation and bots