A touching story indeed, welcome to the nostalgia players group.
Time goes by and things evolve, games evolve and even you evolved. Like a pokemon. And as the time move forward you cannot do anything but to look at the past and sigh, reviving those memories that made you happy. It's like falling in love with a band! You love how they sound...you love their songs, the lyrics! The feelings! But then the band release a new album and the genre changes. It's not what you used to love. And you have 2 choices. Get stuck in their previous songs and quit listening to their future releases or just understand that the band you love is still there, somewhere, but it had to change.
You said that urself: "it makes me physically sick to start over". And this is where the game changed.
Now let's for a moment ignore the GOD servers that started really bad, they wanted to improve the game, they wanted to bring some fresh air into the game we loved! And they failed. Ok so, keep this in mind. As the patches moved on they tried to fix their mistakes and classes were split again and started to be back to their "unique original form". The classes started to be more and more fun to play and way more contents getting into the game with new lore!
Classic servers tried to get players to join back using their nostalgia. But statistics are talking loud: they failed yet again. Why? Cause Classic had nothing of classic.
At the very start on EU servers you had a 100% nostalgia feeling with those 'hardcore' settings and p2p. Paying for each one of the accounts, slow XP with ur pt, crafting and spoiling! And let's not forget the NA start! Daaaam the crowd!
And now one last step. Essence or, for the new guys, Aden. And alternative server where you can see the "what if" of the GOD. What would happen if we were not going to get awakening at 85? Well, we're gonna figure it out! But...we probably wont.
Cause all the 3 projects were doomed and are doomed to fail as they share 1, disruptive, mechanics: p2w abuse.
Now, do you remember when i early told ya "They wanted to bring fresh air into the game, but failed"? Ok so this is it, all over again, for all their projects. And i'm not talking about NCWest eh, they are publishers. I mean the NCKorea. The reason why they turned the game into a legit afk-to-play is cause as you said, people is no longer willing to spend months grinding to get 1 level. This, is an helpfull feature. There's no longer a gap (at least on XP) between legits and not.
Problem is they are making you pay a lot to allow you to even XP, as you can see on Aden servers. You said there's no drops nor adena. I can tell you that you are wrong. I'm dropping tons of C/B armors and i dropped so far 3 weapons C myself. I managed to get 1 full plate set and 1 divine robe set from full drops + several no-set boots/gloves/helms. Also an Avadon leather armor. As for the adenas, so far i farmed probably over 30kk adenas (but i wasted them on items so rip).
This is it, sadly. The reason why you can't see the point of this game anymore is cause you're looking from the wrong point.
Auto hunt to help you level up and farm while you do other stuffs. A game where you gotta spend lots of moneys to keep XPing and gearing up to get on top. A game where you can do anything on your own, no time to waste with parties.
This is the goal of the Aden version. F2P but P2P. Later on the P2P will turn into heavy P2W.
Look at the Awakening servers: P2W is so insane that classes are perfectly balanced now. They all oneshot each others.