It was beautiful.

I played probably 8-10k hours across three characters and 8 years. So not that much ;)

The world used to be much harder to get into, requiring a ton of RW time, RW skill and grinding to really progress. Then each seperate workflow (PvP, PvE, industry, extraction, scanning, ...) became safer as well as easier to grok and master as a single user.

Then there was somewhat of an eternal september amongst a dwindling population as the old guard finished dropping out.