Dear Ironangel,
I left my alliance temporarily and tried out your suggestions. I could not upload photos here, but the new alliance tab was not as you have described earlier. There is no mixture of top, mid and entry level alliance. It is only populated by 1-2 alliance with 5000-7000 medals and 40-50 members, the rest of the alliance have less than 2000 medals and less than 10 members.
This heavily skewed statistic might have caused very few or even no players to join the alliances of those who have expressed concerns here. My alliance is nowhere near Top clans, it has only 500 minimum medals and most of us are still in medieval of gunpowder age, we are not developed enough to have an unannounced sudden shut off of new recruits.
While I appreciate the new changes to the alliance gate, I sincerely hope that the Developers would not try to fix what is not broken and at least restore back the inflow of recruits to us, perhaps by rebalancing the heavily skewed numbers of clans with 1-5 members in the alliance gate to include more mid range and some top clans too (as you have mentioned earlier).
I think I can live with a dumber AI or other annoying bugs, but shutting the tap off alliance recruitment will cause many clans to die off, and an eventual self destruction of the game itself. Thanks for your notice and consideration in advance.