It's cool how the trashing option for Butcher is not mandatory, allowing this card to simply be the terminal silver's-worth-of-coin-tokens card.
As cool as it sounds to be able to turn an Estate or even a Copper into a Province, it's actually a pretty weak use of Butcher since you have the option of simply spending your coin tokens during your buy phase. Butcher trashing is good in the same situations as Remodel and Salvager trashing, not Altar trashing. The strength of Remodel and Salvager is to get value out of your good cards to get even better cards. If you use Butcher to trash a Copper and spend 8 coin tokens to get a Province in return, you essentially just played a Trade Route that gave 0$ coins.
Consider another example, where you have a hand of Copper-Copper-Copper-Butcher-Gold and you have 6 coin tokens. You play Butcher and gain 2 more coin tokens. Now, if you trash a Copper to gain Province with the 8 coin tokens, you can proceed to buy a Duchy during the buy phase, but if you trash the Gold and spend the 2 coin tokens to get a Province in return, you can use the remaining 6 coin tokens with the Coppers to buy a second Province.
I'm curious to know how much complexity coin tokens themselves bring into the game. They smooth out buys, possibly leading to LESS hesitation when say you have 6$, but you really want a 5$ card. I feel like the complexity involved in Guilds has to do more with allowing for more optimization, rather than Dark Ages which is complex based on the actual strategic choices and card interactions available in it.
Edit: I open the post saying how Butcher is at least a terminal coin-token silver, then forget that it's a coin-token silver when comparing it to Trade Route. Classic. You know, this card sort of solves the Remodel problem of what to do with it in the early game.
