No, the best items in the game are enchanted by the player easily.
Okay so they're still not coming from the merchants, so having a lot of gold still isn't messing up the "economy". You have to acquire good equipment to enchant and track down the spells and powerful enough souls to make something useful. Merchant equipment stops at mid tier stuff. You have to go exploring to get the highest tier stuff. You don't need a ton of gold for any of that.
I agree selling stuff was annoying, but it wasn’t that hard.
And you are arguing that is good game design? I don't want to waste time doing tedious time consuming shit. I want to do cool challenging things. I'm playing games to have fun. If the obstacles put in my way to try and force me to play the way the devs want are just taking more time they're not really obstacles, they're just annoying and un-fun.