To me, cRPG was never meant to be a "Fair" mod. From starting as a farmer with grandiose dreams of being a 2 hander like Jesus (some dude who impressed me as he killed me) to grinding day in and day out for my gothic set of armour. My stats weren't as good and my equipment sucked compared to people who'd played it for longer but that's how everybody started and the mod grew in popularity from there.
You put time and effort into it and you got a tangible reward and you progressed from peasant to someone who had a fighting chance, sometimes.
When looms were introduced it was just another goal to attain. Would I be happy walking around in an unloomed set of armour and a basic flamberge? No, not really because I would feel like I was missing out. Generations and looms were a mechanic to get people to retire and so reduce the amount of high-levelled players in the game and levelling up from a peasant became easier and easier.
I don't know what it's like to be a new player now but if you're not the kind of person who likes to put any effort in then there's always a Skip-the-Fun character.
A lot of people like to play on servers where there are the most people, and that's why servers like Mount & Siege/Napoleon Roleplay are always popular now, because they're usually the highest populated servers in Native/Napoleon. I am an admin on Mount & Siege and they've been targetted many times by DDOSS attacks which killed the player base and it took effort from the admins and owner to get the population back.
How did they achieve it? By logging on to the server and playing the game.
When people say cRPG is not fun is it because they don't enjoy the mod or because there's not a lot of people playing it? If it's the first reason then why would anything help you to enjoy the mod any more? If it's the second reason then you gotta put some time into playing it so other people will join.
