Short answers:
1. Prior to AOS, UO was about COMMUNITY. The AOS crew turned it into an item-based, VERSUS game, whether PvP, PvE, PvM, PV whatever, and made insurance so cheap that there was no longer any risk whatsoever.
2. No. The current UO is a third-person, 2d fighting game with a little crafting thrown in.
3. Respect. Pride. A sense of accomplishment. Making friends. People appreciating your work on their behalf.
There was a real sense of pride in having your name on a lot of people's armor and weapons, people really appreciated getting their stuff repaired. You could walk around places that other people wouldn't dare, without combat skills, because even most reds wouldn't bother you, they knew they would need their stuff fixed or new stuff made someday, and you would remember them. I remember mining north of Minoc, a red attacked me, one of his friends stopped him, told him to leave me alone, attacking blacksmiths wasn't very smart.
4. I'm not sure. After I finally managed to GM Blacksmithy, I opened a shop east of Britain, and I enjoyed running it. I did move to Vesper beach in Trammel, because most of the non-PvP people left Felucca, and it was no longer safe to run a shop there. I had been ganked recalling home exactly once before Trammel opened, but it became an everyday event, every time I recalled home after Trammel. I even sat at the Brit smiths for a while before Trammel opened. People would stand patiently in line waiting to get their stuff fixed, or bring all the materials to make a new set of armor. Some tipped good, some didn't tip at all. I made a lot at the shop, but sitting at the brit smith wasn't about profit, it was a community service and something that you did because people needed their equipment repaired and really appreciated it. If my blacksmith character recalled in, and nobody was there, I would just stay there a while until somebody else dropped by.
Now, the long answer to #1:
1. Even after Trammel, it was an online WORLD, where there were a few pure fighters, but there were a lot of treasure hunters, blacksmiths, tailors, miners, shopkeepers, militia, people who did little more than sit at the bank and talk about politics, thieves, bounty hunters, role-players, fishermen, assassins, PK'ers, realtors (you could own more than one house, which made that a profitable profession), IDOC campers (there were a lot of battles over some of the IDOC houses), animal tamers, a whole world of people each doing their own thing.
AOS turned it into an item-based fighting game. The head honcho of that crew admitted that he didn't play UO, but he was a Diablo addict, so they just followed his lead and tried to turn the whole, complex UO WORLD into a pathetic, second-rate Diablo clone. Which worked about as well as could be expected, subscriptions dropped from 250,000 diverse people to the 50,000 or so accounts that are still open today, many of which are single players with 5 or 10 accounts each. From the lack of actual players on most shards, it would appear that most current subscribers don't really play any more, they just don't want to lose their stuff, and $14 a month isn't a big deal. But there is a lot of attrition among them, as their wives will go thru the automatic payments on their bank accounts and wonder why they still pay that money for a game they haven't played much in years. (I have first-hand knowledge of that problem, but I did protest until they said that the classic shard was no longer a possibility)
The truth is, subscriptions dropped because there was a big demand out there for social games, as the success of Facebook games and even the UO free shards can attest. But there just wasn't that big of a demand for yet another two-dimensional fighting game.
Prior to the AOS hacks getting their hot little hands on UO, We Build Worlds was more than just a slogan. In Minoc, Topher McDaddy, Mayor McCheese, Venom, me and a bunch of other guys took it upon ourselves to protect the Minoc mine from reds, who had a tendency to raid it and kill the miners, and the T2A entrance above town where they would congregate. If I was out killing monsters in a dungeon and got killed by a red and lost my stuff, I would go back to the Brit smithy and get Old Hippy or one of the other smiths to make me some new armor and a new sword, then recall to one of the vendor houses and pick up some bandages and potions, gather up some friends and go back for revenge. Sometimes there would be an epic battle with the PK'er and a few of his friends, sometimes the PK'er would have already recalled out, sometimes I would just die again. If I died, it was back to the Brit smiths with the materials to make a suit, and a tip for the smith. Most of them did the work for free, lived on the tips. I eventually GM'ed blacksmithy and sat at the Brit smiths with some of the veteran smiths. It was actually fun.
Post-AOS, I log in my fighter. I have to have separate characters, one fighter, one mage, one animal tamer, one craftsman, one treasure hunter. Each template takes 6 fighting skills to be effective, and the mage and craftsman each have to soulstone a skill. The days of the tank mage/miner are long gone. All of my friends either quit or went to free shards. My faction members only want to kill other players, the idea of a dungeon crawl is beneath them. They all have two or more accounts, one with a house in Trammel to store all their stuff, another close to the Yew moongate or Brit moongate in Fel. The one house restriction has worked to force everybody to keep a second account if they want to PvP, but it's a very bad way to boost subscriptions.
Anyway, my fighter goes to a Trammel dungeon, there's practically no danger. He can pretty much kill anything. In a Felucca dungeon, there aren't any blue players left, and the reds will kill anybody on sight, even their own faction members, so the concept of killing monsters in a Felucca dungeon solo just isn't a good idea. My craftsman just sat in the corner for years after AOS, the BOD system sucked. They did finally introduce Imbuing, which made him useful again, but nothing like before AOS.
Basically, AOS was when the game went from being a community to being a paper skill and item-based combat game with a few of the social aspects left in, mostly because they couldn't find an easy way to get rid of them.
