You are assuming that someone wants to actually maximize the Gold buff, especially factoring in time, not just play the game. I always planned to do tower, grinding hunts wasnt in my current playbook or time allotmentThat's not how that works.
Say I offered you two lump sum payments. One was worth $1000 and one was worth $700. I then tell you that you can apply a 30% bonus to one of them and a 10% bonus to the other. What are you going to do to maximize your payout? You take $1000 * .3 + $700 * .1 = $370 bonus versus $700 *.3 + $1000 * .1 =$ 310 bonus.
Same holds true here. It's worth it to run hunts instead of AT during the buff event and then run AT during regular down-time throughout the month.
Ideally you run AT up to floor 75-ish during down-time on 10% buff and then run AT 75-100 during 30% buff.
waiting to do tower until buff means I just got more for doing something I was already going to do, now that im done with tower im not just going to do hunts to maximize the buff, im moving on to side story