You know, I have pretty much stopped finding an interesting in the actual game for 3-4 years now, after I left FW. Which means I still enjoyed it maybe 4 years or so, which is already something. On my first MMO, which was SWG, I got fed up of the (nonsensical) gameplay past a few months. I still stayed ingame for 3-4 years after just because of RP and what we were able to do with the little community I was into. And we did awesome things.
And like all the things, we had a golden age, and then decline.
Tbh they would need to introduce a lot of changes in the game for me to care again about it. But I don't play for that anyway. It would be nice to have something else to do again, but RP is enough by me. The only issue I have is when I don't have any RP solutions and when it's mostly dead. This is when I seriously consider quitting.
So I don't really think i'm in your position regardless. If people are caustic, i'm not sure it's because of that tbh. People are caustic because there are plenty of unsolved issues that stand between them. Issues that people do not want to speak about or hear about because they can't accept them. Most people prefer to sit on their privileges when they have acquired them, and when it stomps on other people fun or life in the community, they will do whatever they can to beat them to death out of selfishness.
I have seen that on other MMOs, but usually they tend to explode pretty fast and communities eventually collapse. Here it is not the case thanks to a strong core of people sharing good RP values, an overall more mature group, and a good environment with similar ideals. But one can't suppress feuds between people that will inevitably appear, and when people do not want to face them out of fear to see something shattering, or just out of fear of losing their privileges, things start to get insidious and stay for ages rotting again and again until the bitterness starts to really smell.