They're around. They just can't fix anything without the Devs patches from Korea. So everything takes longer since it's not up to them. The forum moderators that you see here are just that. Most of them never manage several forums for different games and probably most never played Lineage II. The same with support. The GMs and the rest, I assume are understaffed and have better things to do than monitor the servers 24/7.
This is not a thing and it will never be. At the moment you don't even have transfers between Naia and Chronos but even when you will have them, "transferring" to another region is not doable, much less completely different systems like EU and NA.
Most people bypass this with Red Libra. It's always been like this for mage weapons, unfortunately
Also not up to anyone on NCWest to change this.
There's a free anniversary event going on right now and we just had 6 weeks of attendance list rewards. I know people don't consider this as good rewards, but they're really not that bad, and it's free "Stay competitive" comes from L2 Store events. If you don't want to spend money on this game (which is fine), you really have to adjust your expectations.
On the top 150 rank, all players are 110+ on their mains. So maybe when ranked players are 120+, they will give you free stuff until 110 it took them a long while to give immortal gear with mentee diplomas to 85 characters. Now you have paulina and exalted gear available to pretty much everyone (including some nice freebies as the brooch jewels, dyes, dragon shirt, circlet and so on). Never in the history of this game people had this much gear given away for free. Clearly it's impossible to make everyone happy