First of all, do you honestly not see the appeal between starting a game that costs NOTHING to a game that costs 12 bucks a month? Especially one that is 13 years old and looks it? The point is that the game has good content, but many people balk at the outdated appearance. If people got started, many would be willing to pay for upgrades. This isnt just my crazy idea, its a payment paradigm that has proven itself time and time again.
If a game can't appeal to me at $10 a month (or more if you pay per-month I suppose), it's not going to appeal to me at $0 a month. An MMO can't be bad if it's $10 a month, but good if it's $0 a month. It's either good or it's not.
Speaking of outdated appearance, F2P wouldn't solve that. As for F2P proving itself, I've done the F2P thing, and I get more out of my $10 a month that I pay to EA for a UO account than anything I've given to Turbine/Warner Brothers, especially with Lord of the Rings which has really dropped the ball on F2P stuff. Yet, LOTRO continues to be held up as an example of F2P by people who have never really played it. People complain about a lot of things with UO and the devs, but they've never experienced the teasing that has went on over housing in LOTRO for a few years now.
Secondly, people will ALWAYS rant, no matter the state of the game. Thats just the nature of games and online forums.
The important thing is that they weren't ranting over the costs, they were ranting over problems with UO and EA and those problems would still exist, regardless of the pay model.
Well look at it this way, if they keep losing customers there is ZERO chance we will get more development power. If we are GAINING players and income there is a chance that we will get more.
If they can't keep the developers they have when they are actually profitable and can point to 13 years worth of payments they've actuallly received, they aren't going to gain developers over the promises of future payments.
As for them not caring about UO etc, well why would you expect them to? It's a game with under 1% of the mmo market share and shrinking.
EA's treatment of UO cannot be explained by simple discussions of money - there was a lot done to undercut Origin by other EA executives who were busing building their little empires elsewhere within EA. UO's problems are due in large part to the treatment of Origin. EA's current CEO even admitted that EA treated a lot of studios they bought very poorly and micro-managed them into the ground. Of course after he said that, UO still lost developers in the wake of Warhammer crashing and burning, which proves he wasn't actually serious.
But if I were the person developing UO, trying to make the product ive been put in charge of look more impressive going F2P would be the first thing I would do.
If I were in charge of developing UO, I would try to make EA stop pretending it doesn't exist.
When Warhammer and DOS games from the mid 1990s have more of a presence on the official BioWare Mythic forums than UO or Camelot, then something is seriously wrong and can't be explained by UO or Camelot's market shares.
A point will come when there is nothing to lose by going to F2P because the sub rates are so low, and the game will rebound when it happens.
EA is just going to kill it if it reaches a certain point. They don't care about UO, their eyes are focused only on Warhammer and Star Wars, even as Blizzard is pushing hard into developing Titan. There is more noise being made inside of EA about remaking the Ultimas than there is about UO.
If EA won't even let UO keep their dev teams intact when they are profitable, they aren't going to have a change of heart if player numbers drop below a certain point.
UO's problems run so very deep.
The way it was>Seige is not the same IMO..no offense]
Gonna have to call :"shenanigans"
"Shenanigans"
with this, really. 
