You start playing Eve in 2003 or 2004 or so. You glance at the setting and it seems like so much cliché, but you enjoy the game and it reminds you of Elite and its successors, so it's all good. Over time, you find that, actually, the setting is pretty nuanced in a lot of ways. There's all those little details in the game that serve to drive your curiosity. Those original developers put so much of themselves into this thing and it shows. There's no big overarching story as such, just a myriad of small stories in all sorts of formats that help bring the world to life. There are the chronicles, which barely hint at some of the machinations of the powerful, but mostly deal with the little guys. They help set the scene for you, the player. They emphasise that there are no real heroes or villains, just people doing their thing; and all of that is only right for a sandbox MMO.
Furthermore, the world is vast, which allows all sorts of latitude for players to create their own niches. Aside from Battlestar Galactica roleplayers, it's almost impossible to go too badly wrong. In many ways it's the gaps that lead to the richest speculation. Still, it becomes apparent that the background material has largely been abandoned over time, and people yearn for more short stories and factual material to keep fleshing out the game world. Some people have great ideas. Ideas that build on the existing material. Some people are pretty damn good at writing and gain recognition among their peers. Some even get jobs at CCP. There is hope.
There are other people, though, that have rather different ideas about what Eve should be. Subtlety and nuance are all very well, and served the game admirably at the beginning, but Epic and Awesome are way more exciting, right? Epic and Awesome are words that have cachet in marketing circles too. Think Big. Think Grand Conspiracy Theories, and Enheduanni and Deus Ex Machina, and monetization of your IP. Eve can be bigger! Better! Bolder! And now with novel tie-ins and movies and, and, and.
Everything changes and there's less and less to hold you. Still, much is promised, so there's always hope for the future. Then it's 2011 and you've been an ex-Eve player longer than you were an active Eve player and you know that you're probably never coming back now.
Now, I don't think that Tony Gonzales is a bad person or anything. I think he's probably a very nice chap. I do think, however, that he was part of a ruinous trend at CCP that led to a culture of empty promises and the triumph of hype over content. I think that he had far too much say in the direction of content delivery. I think that there were a bunch of people hired for all the wrong reasons: people that could talk a good game but couldn't deliver the sort of quality that the product deserved. We've seen how that's worked out.
I think that the real shame of it is that there were plenty of people that could have delivered, but they were honing their craft and engaging with the community instead of busily networking with the right people to get a foot in the door.