+1 to pretty much everything said in this thread so far. tl;dr types, feel free to skip the rest of this post
To me, it has always seemed that the player community has been divided into those who were primarily looking for KotOR 3 and those who were primarily looking for Star WoW, with relatively few people honestly attracted to the game for both facets from the outset. As a strictly solo player (exception: Valor 5 and FPs for DvL Eternal, and boy did I drag all those teams down), I've always been one of the KotOR 3 types, and have always been pleasantly surprised at just how well the devs managed to preserve that single-player feeling in an MMO, largely because of the class storylines and companion interaction.
The more that complexity collapses, the more my enjoyment erodes, and the companion absences have broken an otherwise pleasant immersion, but that's on me. Though I've invested a significant amount of money in ~4 years of subscription (plus CM purchases), when the inevitable occurs and the enjoyment is no longer worth the expenditure, I doubt I'll be all fiery about it. Just quietly unsub, with enjoyable memories of the countless hours spent in these stories. Maybe re-sub later if the game is still there, as I also tend to revisit single-player RPGs.
During the 5.0 RNG crisis, the most common argument seems to be that the mechanics introduced in 5.0 are blatantly designed to artificially extend existing content (and thus extend people's subscriptions), and that the developers should realize that the community is so opposed to the current direction that the changes will, in fact, have the opposite effect on subscriptions. The counter-arguments, when they occur, seem to be that the vocal unsubscribers do not reflect a silent majority of players who are perfectly content to adjust to the new changes.
This has made me wonder how many KotOR 3 'casuals' are actually out there subscribing, and whether our consumer loyalty is also on the line. I mean, I've been steadily subbed for 4 years, investing significant time off and on, just enjoying solo content, and because of the intricacy of the vanilla storylines, the relative depth of NPC interaction, and my own penchant for enjoying the scenery (/datacrons), I still haven't even finished all of the class arcs!
While I'm not in the business of crusading for changes, I do quietly wonder whether there are enough 'story' players that streamlining trend evident through the various expansions isn't going to have a similarly deleterious effect on their long-term subscriber base, just with a significant time delay. Unfortunately, short of the devs sending out a detailed survey, there is no way of gauging this, the theoretical *silent* majority of players being just that.
Also, well-met, fellow Shadowlands slow-buffing altaholics