Dear Henrik Nel,
You have a problem of trust. The main thing EU sells is the fact that it is RCE. For this reason, the features based on look and feel are not of such high importance as the aspects of the economy that are impacted. People care less about how things look and more about the impact on the pedcard.
Loot 2.0 is a nice change, in the sense that it removed the variation from loot, but a side effect of that change is that it made it clear that with whatever setup you play, you will always lose unless you hit some nice markup. And because the economy is not properly designed, the probability to get enough markup is rather low. For this reason, the price on most items dropped lately, as people don't trust they can be successful with them anymore. Crafting and mining are 2 important systems in EU that needs careful strategic design. Making those work is more important than any feature you plan to release.
Again, EU players are usually not naive and they understand that for playing the game, one must pay. Any profit one manages to make, is from other players, not from beating the system. For this reason, there has to be a way for players to find things other people need. As it is, no one needs much from what other players can offer. Except for healers, maybe...
IMO, EU could be more successful if the cost of play would be lower and people would be encouraged to play for longer with the same amount of cash. You did that with loot 2.0. But the game is still expensive for what it offers.
In reality you offer time on your servers. You put a price on that. You could choose to sell more time for less, rather than selling less time for more. That way, you can have more players around and people would have more opportunities to interact with each other. In exchange for that, more people could become paying customers. If you think about it, a player that plays on a budget, it will play until that budget is spent, and then stop. If one has to stop long before he expects, the probability to come back, will drop.
A game such as EU needs genuine success stories. I do not feel that such stories can happen with this system, because there is no obvious success path that one could take, and decide to invest in game and trust in the fact that it will be successful. I know that "EU is dynamic" and we can work with this, but if this dynamic nature is like a hurricane, is just chaos. A level of chaos is always good, but if there is nothing but that, it will hurt the trust of the player base, and in the end, it will hurt the bottom line of the company.
It is frustrating that in EU skills do not seem to be as important as they could be. I will not insist on this topic. They do help, but when you have them, you do not feel that they do much for you. With the new loot system, where the loot is more based on expenses and less on mob type/level, you could make it that at higher skill levels, things can become more spectacular in some way...
Good luck with your new job.