Is it time to move on.

Well whats your point? you went on explaining how 42,000+ users. etc etcetc...... What What i was explaining is addition to the issues and LLABS has been occuring.....

It's always like that, because the customer doesn't have much of a choice. There never was and never will be a sandbox MMORPG like UO. Only SWG came pretty close in the early days, and an SF setting isn't everyone's taste.
Aside from that, people "worked" hard to earn money, houses, ships etc., or in case of grind games like EQ / WoW, a level X0 character with a mount and first class gear. Leaving for another game means to lose everything and having to start over again.

I think it was SOE who first realized that customer service is simply not necessary. Once the customers are hooked, they'll endure pretty much everything. With kicking and screaming, but without ever cancelling their account unless they get bored anyway.
In case of SL, some people invested a lot and even made it their only source of income. Now we're stuck with SL for good. The customer has no leverage whatsoever and simply has to live with outages and lack of service.

I'm talking about the many that do neither of the above

My non-premium characters are also tired of people begging for money too, and people who don't create stuff, swear they'll never put a cent into SL, don't rent/own land then whinging & whining about how bad LL run things.

sigh......well LLABs had stopped replies to people that don`t want freebie accounts. Frankly i rather pay more money a month and have then stop freebie accounts al together.

It has been my experience in SL, that premium account holders, "whine" far more about "how bad LL runs things" than non paying members do. Maybe the non payers whine far less because they are not consistently, month after month, dumping money into a "game" that is hugely unstable. I'll be the first to admit, that I, as a premium member, complain more than any of them do. In addition to my membership fee, I owned land, on which I had a large club, and paid a handsome fee to LL every month. And yet there were so many times during that period, that I couldn't even log in, never mind all the problems that plagued me once I did. Issues are a constant in this game, just look at the forums which are filled with the complaints about them. Premium members hold SL to a higher standard than non paying members do, and really, why shouldn't they? They're spending their hard earned money on it, and often have a business of some sort they are trying to run. When your paying for a service, you expect to get that service, "consistently" (LL takes your monthly fee "consistently" every month, funny how that never seems to be an issue), and when you don't, it's extremely frustrating to say the least.
When you get something for free, you can "afford" a much more relaxed attitude with regards to expectations. Most of us know, nothing worthwhile in life is free..

i agree that beggars are bad ive only come across a few in my sl time usually i just tell them i dont give out money and i pass them a newbie kit or freebie clothes i have and teach them how to find classes to learn to make things

I wonder if the fairest way of limiting numbers to what the system can cope with is to make it so people can only log on for a certain number of hours in a 24-hour period - say 8 hours for premium members and 4 for basic accounts.

This would also help to tackle any problem of addiction to SL. There are probably a handful of occasions when I've spent 8 hours in-world in any one day, but usually I spend much less.