I hope that the formatting doesn’t happen, but I am pretty sure that it will. It is just the way that most card games work. I had already quit playing HS a couple months before they had announced the formatting, but that made sure that I wasn’t ever going to start up again. I like playing gimmick decks and those often need extremely specific cards to fufill roles. Removing older cards will completely cripple or even paralyze some of these ideas. Most of these ideas are suboptimal to begin with and removing the pillars they are built on will make them completely unplayable.
For instance the Blistering Skorn changes. I agree that the card was a bit on the strong side, but I have a Control Vaath list that needed some 3 drops badly. If I don’t get my early removal spells I often have no plays for the first 2 turns and I end up overdrawing. Skorn was okay to be cost increased, but it hurt my deck far more than it hurt any others.
Even if they do decide to go with the Formatting thing, I think that we will all grumble and complain but keep playing anyway. There was an uproar when HS announced the changes, but I think the game is still strong as ever. With Duelysts generous income generation it isn’t as bad to start building up new collections.
I noticed a lot of Thumping Wave hate lately, and Formatting would mean the removal of it after a few expansions. But then we would also lose cards that everyone likes, such as Sunforge Lancer(major improvement for Healyonar), Allomancer, Sphere of Darkness, Moloki Huntress(Only thing making Grow decks playable), Frostburn, Zho(including all other BPets), Crescent Spear, etc…

