It's because NC burst the hypocritical bubble. Starting off in prelude/C1, RMT was a bannable offense. Anything more than the 13 dollars you spent a month was illegal and broke the EULA. Now, RMT is the ONLY way to level up your toon. They killed the classic experience by putting a pay shop in. They killed the classic experience by putting that stupid afk autohunting button on there. The holiday events (one of the most fun aspects of the game) they used to have was an awesome chance for starting out players to make money to buy gear. Then they killed that by making the "events", and I'm loosely using this term, since it's absolutely NOTHING like the events that we had... only available to top level players. This game used to be about the adventure and growing as a community (clans/alliances/or just meeting people from all over the world), now for impatient gamers it's a race to the finish. It used to be if you wanted to level quickly, start a party and be a part of the community. It used to punish bad behavior by making PK'ers drop stuff when they got killed (another fun aspect, seeing 20 people chase down a red to get their drops). I was one that was truly excited when they released a classic server because I do miss the old days of grinding your butt off. I was hoping that it was going to be a mirror image of that game I loved. Found out right away that turned into a big steaming pile. There's a reason (a billion of them) why the server population is about a tenth of what it used to be, why there were 8 servers for live iirc. People got sick of the cash grab that this game has turned into. I know a lot of people that quit when the P2W shop was introduced, I was one of them. I was happy being in the middle, just grinding away minding my own business, making friends, partying, and joining alliances. Just as always, the people that are killing the game are the whales that spend thousands of dollars (or tens of thousands, which I can't even fathom, but whatever floats your boat) for the big pee pee flex. The only thing that NC listened to was the population crying that there were too many bots. Now, a good portion of the things that you acquire you can't sell/trade with the "imprint" system, and in effect, they made practically the whole server bots with AFK hunting (which also used to be a bannable offense...see the irony? Only okay if we can make money off of it). AFK hunt and come back and dump your credit card then go back AFK.
As for classes, I've always played a dwarf, so I'm used to never being FOTM. Our only perk that we had was crafting/scavenging to make money to gear ourselves better than the others, and that got taken away from us also. We were always the fat kid in gym that got picked last for teams except for clans that needed a crafter/scavenger for mats/gear and for golems in sieges.
In all, they made it pay to win because you're willing to pay, and they've basically told the community there's nothing you can do about it.