I'm not surprised. i know the dev team is working their asses off because their jobs likely depend on this game succeeding, but development takes a long time, and players' patience is not nearly as long. I don't want to believe it, but this game may have been doomed from launch even if what Yoshida said about not having to please investors is true. I have trouble seeing how SE will develop enough content that's both quality enough to be fun and sufficient to occupy players, since the game shipped with almost none. It feels like they'd need a whole other development team just for adding content until it gets to an acceptable level, then they could continue with the standard one, but this game's been a big enough monetary drag on SE as is so I doubt that'll happen.

As an earlier post mentioned, the next few patches would probably have to be dynamite to keep this game at a "fair" population even if it is free. Hell, I have more to do on some F2P games than I do on this one right now, and the slow slog to rank 50 doesn't help motivation.