I think they used Crowns rather real currency to disassociate the actual cost of items. Also it allows a set in game price regardless of user's local currency. I think that is pretty standard and I doubt it was leading to the crates.

When a game goes F2P with micro transactions, the end goal is usually to implement stuff like this that can generate money if they find whales to waste their money on ones and zeroes (not even getting into the moral argument here even though it's a big deal too).

Here's one thing I thought about this week.

We can assume that they had their MBA's and accountants figure out the pricing for DLCs to make them enough money to be profitable while assuming that 40-50% or so of non-subscribers don't buy them.

What happens if the adoption rate isn't as high as they need it to be to be profitable? They'll offer bundles to entice people, sure. But they're losing money in that scenario. Crown crates will help make some of that up. But it's dangerous nowadays. People are sensitive to that nonsense and predatory marketing.

IDK, and obviously I'm not on their business development team, but RNG boxes have never EVER brought good things to a game. No game has ever suddenly pivoted to amazing because of the additional revenue stream from RNG boxes.

Def worried.

They had a lot of new players recently, all of them had to buy the basic game, so I don't think finances was the reason behind. I had my worries what was the reason and none of that is friendly for the players or says anything good about the current management...
And in my experience, players need to enjoy the game 1st, then they are willing to buy other upgrades for reasonable price if it add to their good experience, so probably some of that didn't meet their wishes.
My guess is that DLCs were selling good, but the market objects only sometimes, so they were thinking, that they will not make enough of DLCs to make profit, so they focused on the market, where players didn't spend their money, and on subs.
The problem is what I saw in my experience+my limited wallet, that players need a clever system of features for small fees, that are cool to have in the game. If it costs too much or if you don't need it really, you will not buy it (unless you are rich).
So they needed to create a system, that would meet that. And for sure, that doesn't require RNG boxes. Some companies had small cool stories, that could make your game better, didn't cost too much to create, and brought some profit. Or here in ESO players complained about cosmetics being too expensive, because you would spend only some amount of money on an evening dress, so more, but cheaper would be solutions, or sales on the end of the month could make those less rich players buy things they don't need. But again, if they would create a cosmetic system, that would be cool and you could spend some of your money there every month, it would be similar to the system of crates, but players would buy it, because it would be cool.
The system with boxes is questionable, the system with boxes in ESO is the worst I ever saw in any FtP MMO.