When I started you could perfect your skills really quickly and easily as you could practice on low level and immune mobs. So you could go into the air of Galadon and gather all birds or Kobold cavern and get defenses done in an hour.

When I started CF had a way more casual approach to OOC so it was way easier to get help with things. These days the damn newbie quest in the caverns is regarded as secret and people are getting yelled at if they are asking questions about it.

When I started there were not as many secrets and it was pretty ok to do a map of something like Elven Vaults even if it was an area explore. These days more and more powerful things come from area explore / quests and they are seen as incredibly secret so it is almost impossible to actually learn what advantages the "in crowd" (IMMS and certain players) has.

When I started players dependence on IMMS to get an advantage was pretty minimal. Quest forms and skills were rare and that has changed towards a lot is hinging on IMMS to gain an advantage with several classes.

When I started I as a newbie could always get things like jeweled broadswords (that also was better) because they were unlimited.

I understand that these are design decisions that has been made and several are probably really good for your idea of the game. But I also feel that the vision of creating a realistic fantasy world is not always aligned with those that play the game. The community around CF is incredibly limited these days and I think creating maps, guides and adding items to item databases is vital to retain newbies but the vibe you get from IMMS has more or less squashed those attempts so people have grown tired of it.