I think what you posted is mostly right, maybe not the ladder reset part, but the item situation for sure.

For me a ladder reset is not about the items, you can farm it eventually anyway. It's about leveling up, exploring everything as first, reaching 99 as first and the increased player base in this time period. I wanted more ladder resets too, but for that reason. Not for item reset. I agree with Lucid there. But that beside, it's ok if you think differently there...

The problem imo is, we have no real mid class player base, as you said. You are in this position right now. There are too few players, and as you said, if you level 1-90 and stay there with no gear but tedious boss fights and 1k hours ahead of you. There is no real content to justify that amount of time to get to that level. You shouldn't compare yourself with that, but of course you do, players want to reach the highest level obviously.

Key hunting is time consuming, also frag parts and all of that. 24 SoH for a soulstone may sound like a cool idea, but is stupid if you allow endless loaders, could just make it 3 SoH and drop one each time. Like 2 patches ago we had a aware "bug" that dropped two organ sets for one key set. Considering the ease to level chars, the time to spend and now even recipes with annis, I think that should NOT have been "fixed".

In my opinion, d2 bnet vanilla was so fun to run, because at every point, or almost every, you could get every item. The things you farmed, no matter where, were always kinda rewarding and allowing you to progress. Of course, there was still ubers, but you don't farm them, as you farm dreamlands or plaguelands here now. The items were more balanced in general and you knew there uses already. Also with basic selffound stuff you could do the hardest parts of the game, like Ubers. You can't do that here so easily.

We should care to not have a "power creep" (see: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/648126) effect for the server here. If new content and items gets added, old will get obsolete. If you wanna fight high Cruci stuff, you need the gear of Dreamlands for example. It's similar with what you said, farming cows for hours just to get that HRs that can't directly (e.g. via rune words) help you, but instead you need to collect like ~20 to get a single piece of good item is stupid. I'm not saying we have this situation here, but especially if we get new content, that is limited to "rich" people we will stick with the community we have and new player will stop after a very short while, because it is not as casual as they wanted it to be and really too hard to catch up.

Again, I haven't played 3.2. I can't say how much the changes there work against what I said. I saw some good fixes for sure.

Also I want to mention this is indeed a new mod server. The idea of the server is challenging and should not be fully compared to bnet in every aspect, especially economy and pvm or non yet existent pvp. For players with a lot of time it is surely really good as it is, but I fully support what you are saying needs to get attention too.