As far as the "unkind players" thing goes, there is no difference between now and in the past. If anything, they are nicer, because back in HW you were far more likely to get berated in a duty for being inefficient. With the game not being as well known back then amongst more casual players, it had more of a veteran MMO player (FF11 and WoW) vibe and they can be more toxic to people who underperform.

I'm not sure what you mean by "content being unplayed". Maybe it's because you're on Primal and a lot of people travel to Aether to do content? The RP adverts are always there and not really a problem since they are right at the bottom of the list. Most likely you see the RP adverts a lot because of people making content PFs on other data centers or due to playing during the night time.

It is fair to want to quit over the problem of people traveling to Aether for content, though, or due to repetitive or homogenized classes, or content lacking enough creativity.

One example I could give is how a "Field Operation" could have involed diving underwater and hopping onto temporary boats or submarines to to reach CEs and then make use of the sea life to create unique underwater activities, like under sea battles, catching sharks, finding treasure or exploring sunken ships for it, escaping currents or living seaweed, outracing a sea creature to get to the treasure it's guarding, etc.

They did recently acknowledge that Cosmic Exploration feels the same as any other crafting/gathering and said they have 70-80 staff working on making it "feel" fun and unique, so we'll see if that achieves anything at all soon.

I think your point about there not being lots of other MMOs out there that can make everything fresh is mainly because that's challenging. Once you've got your base combat and crafting/gathering, no matter how unique the battle mechanics, people can just throw the "but the classes work the same still" card, or say the existence of the battles themselves is "predictable" because there is "always a raid in that patch". I think the only way they can really achieve it is with the gimmicks of the content itself, such as some of the ideas I put for Field Operations.