I don't know what rich is; that's relative....
However poor is a new player to UO hitting the create character button and logging in one of the UO towns.
I consider myself a powergamer and a damn good one. I've played in the beta and off and on over the past 12 years.
There is a contradiction there though; you may be a powergamer, but the majority of new players I meet in game are not. They want to see and experience the content and socialize with other people. Neither of which requires powergaming as such... the problem they face is that none of us want to go and hunt Ettins with them. To play with us, we
expect them to powergame.
The cash issue, on it's own is actually pretty easy to solve; I tell them about the dynamic EM content, and tell them that if they get even a dispenser dropped item, it's worth 5m on Europa (where I play). The richer players will out of self interest feed some of the years of inflation and duping back down to them and allow them to catch up somewhat... but then the problem becomes they also get accelerated past the low end content by that cash, but now don't have the character skills; and so also have to powergame to raise their character to the levels required to hunt challenging creatures with the armour and artifacts they can be swimming in by the end of the first two weeks or so.
Now I can show anyone how to get all the crafting they need after 2 weeks of evenings say. What I can't do is show them how to get taming to 120 if they want to go that route. Or, as you also mention, show them where non-existent vendors are for the much wider realm of items they will need to enjoy the game; I'm thinking of High Seas content in particular.
So the real problem is not so much the economy, but the distortive effects it has on people's play style; you simply
have to become like everybody else and end up with one of the small number of high end PvM characters as your main gameplay... mostly I see new players being encouraged to become Sampires. Removing the amount of gold in the economy won't affect this, because it's not market price that drives this dynamic, but
who the veteran playerbase is. And that in turn is set by a Dev Team that is trying to keep us satiated with lots of new grindy things to do at high levels (Ter Mur books I'm looking at you!)
What the game really needs is more cashless, not-skill-based, fun communal things to do. Something that will add a variety of ways to meaningfully spend time in game... because otherwise you will always,
always get runaway item price inflation, as everything everyone does feeds into that inflation, just the currency will shift to what ever the most desired item is. Think Diablo 2 here, because that's the model Age of Shadows was based on; In D2. where the player base has only one model of gameplay, everyone is trying to build their characters up through items. But! There's an extremely low gold cap for everyone. Instead of limiting the price of items though, the currency moved to the item the community settled on as desirable; The Stone of Jordan. Things started being priced in SoJs. But these in turn require one particular play style; endlessly grinding out Baal Runs to get them, in order to buy items. And of course, the more people grinded, and the more SoJs people discovered, the more inflated in SoJ terms an item became... So it will be in Ultima Online too. Make people throw away gold for a Magincia house? Suddenly the house itself is going to be valued at the equivalent of all the time and investment required to get it. Follow THPs idea of a single house in Malas as the prize? People will only drop hundreds of thousands into it if they can leverage it into similar power and wealth elsewhere in the game... You've not reduced inequality and distortion into the market, just moved it elsewhere. Just as in Diablo 2, an attempt to add an alternative grind simply moved the "currency" from SoJs to the Runes that replaced it for character building.
No, the aim should be to give people ways
out of the market, and thus slow it down by not leaving every minute spent in game dependent upon it. People will still powergame, but the less of them doing it, the slower inflation moves.
oh stop!
more drains ... 
