A chart I made of the hammer breakdown pre patch 201:
Base damage to Gold hammer is now 600 rather than 500. You can confirm this by viewing the stats ingame.
Now how much of an improvement this is to where it was previously? This requires quite a bit of testing and really can’t be supported by any anecdotal observation. Why? Because each person has a unique build and the hammer is being applied to blocks of different tiered planets which have different HPs.
I actually intend to do some testing of the new Gold hammer. I have noticed a difference and I think I can find some use cases for it. If you’re looking for Gold to replace iron in every situation, then I don’t think you’ll find it with the new tweaks. If, however, you’re interested in using it in specific scenarios, then I think it might work. Basic framework is for higher tiered planets in combination with possible forgery (but not neccesary) and brews/food.
If you want more insight, I’d point you to this theorycrafting guide on how to use super strength and fast brews on Iron and Copper hammer. I intend to do more of these including Gold 
But hopefully, it will give you some creative ideas.
I made an earlier post here about the simple breakdown in math here. I think you’ll find that some of what I said will reinforce your line of thought. My basic theory is that you only needed some tweaks to damage and that’s what they did…for Gold.