I think it's valid to prefer the old iteration, and I think you're getting clowned on a bit more than necessary for having this opinion. The real answer is we tried for a decade. It was brought back to life again, and again, and again - and every time, the player base grew smaller, and smaller. The very last iteration we were looking at about 5 players a day, who might as well have been in co-op, or running their own, locally hosted server.
It's not about want or desire, really, it's just that this community is old and most people that still play on it have moved on. I'm sure we'd still get 10-20 players by relaunching an old iteration, especially if it was heavy on the nostalgia, but it wouldn't last more than a few months. The experimental versions have at least been pushed with a story line, and intended outcome in mind, which means that even if they run at 20 player capacity, they'll tether out, and tell a cohesive, satisfying story we can reminisce on. They also allow most of us without much free time to explore in bite-sized and curated pieces, rather than having to be tuned in 8 hours a day to get up to speed.
No one (at least here) currently wants to pay for a server box that's going to run until it peters out and dies in a short amount of time. We did traditional relaunches about 3 or 4 different times already, they failed. Servers like Willards innovate their mechanics enough to capture people from semi-serious roleplay in a way that no one here is going to develop enough to do for it to be new fresh and exciting even in the box it's confined to.
So it's a lot of things, it's lack of devwork, lack of interested people, and lack of people wanting to pay. It's just not the right place for it.
