I can help with that.
Back in ye old days people didn’t need to suffer from what is pretty much equivalent to a 15min death sentence when they stole from a can. They got flagged for legal combat (aka no CONCORD intervention) with the whole corp that owned the can, exception being of course NPC corps.
Back in ye old days there was no protection button both meant to protect people from making mistakes and deterring them from “breaking out of the norm” by, for example, trying stealing ore from a jetcan miner. The same “stealing from a jetcan miner” which has been called “brilliant” (due to it being unforeseen player behaviour) by former CCP devs, by the way.
Back in the slightly older days there were 2 million ISK wardecs a new player could start as soon as he was able to afford and the game still worked perfectly fine and grew, year after year, until CCP started listening to the people who naturally dropped out due to not being competitive enough.
CrimeWatch 2.0 marked the end of the era of competitiveness, where the strong willed and smart were able to flourish and those who lacked either one, or both of these traits either improved or perished. CrimeWatch 2.0 also marked the beginning of the state the game is in now, differently explained in an interview by a dev, calling it “expanding the fanbase”, which I more appropriately call “mainstreaming”.
If there was a single paragraph describing literally all of those who complain about gankers, bumpers, wars, people who mine “their roids” and whatever, it is:
These people are not competitive at all and they never will be. Naturally they must complain and beg to higher forces (CCP in this case) to protect them from the “evil” people who do nothing wrong but simply being better. Their nonsensical belief in their stagnant, deadlocked, mediocre wannabe individuality goes so deep, there is no room for self improvement at all.