I agree 100% with what you wrote.
Note that on the official NA servers it took 7 years to go from C0 Chronicles (Prelude) to High Five Part 5. During this time the amount of changes that were done in this game was huge. There was a strong progression of items all the time. In practice every half a year new items appeared. That is why people played it.
On L2Reb they also had to make such a decision about introducing new chronicles, because the server was starting to shrink. Only they did it at the last minute, it's too late here.
I don't expect our devs to work like ncsoft because it is impossible. And it is completely understandable, that is not the point.
I propose to open a classic server from 1.0 or 1.5 and make updates every half or year, the same as they appeared on this server. During this time, the team has time to develop new updates. And everyone will be happy.
I'll just add that a lot of people I've talked to are discouraged from joining the server because of +16 weapons and +8/10 armor. We know this is the result of such a long open server and it's natural. The reason is also that they didn't add more grades as they did on official servers and weapons of lower grades were weaker.
Look out for this spam from RMT. Spam in cities, pm and email... Is there really nothing you can do about it? If someone comes here to play it looks like the official server in 2007, there was the same spam and only bots running. Surely there is some way to solve this problem, even by blacklisting words.