Yes... no Elite on HKG as far as I know. I've certainly flown that route in "economy" and got a "deluxe" seat - back in the days of deluxe. Food/service exactly the same. (Food is awful.)

No risk you'd be asked to pay anything extra. Agree with comments so far that equipment changes are a bit of a plague on regional/local routes - not to mention software glitches that can cause reservations to disappear. So keep checking back from time to time.

crunchie might be right about "elites" - who knows. As a gold, I would hope that EVA maintains its policy of blocking certain seats for the likes of me - but I would never want them to push out someone once the seat's been allocated. This has never happened, to my knowledge. In fact, I have had a less desirable seat only to find that on boarding a non-FF has been allocated a supposedly blocked seat. Diamonds are still rather rare and they might get special treatment - but I'm pretty sure they don't disturb someone's allocation for a gold. Willing to stand corrected.