Bro, you are living in the past.
Think of all the new items you can pick pocket with (almost) everything being tradable. The only thing you're going to be cockblocked on are magic items but the rest of the world is your oyster. Every single time you push that button you might get a prize.
If you need to set up a payment method it is one more thing to go wrong when you're trying to go fast. It's just way, way better to have some DBC cash on hand and buy a bit of the stuff with it that you were always going to buy right away. I want to say that on one of these they had to pause...
I know some people get away with VMs it but others don't. It always sounded easier to me to buy some junk office went out of business and is selling their shit desktops/laptops from eBay or Craigslist and using something like Multiplicity to link it all together.
Another way I would put it is you can be incredibly shitty as a Bard and still not get ejected. As long as you're not actively taking a fucking hammer to the furniture people will probably put up with you.
If you can't find anything on your own the bigger guilds typically will organize premades before launch. It's a dice roll to just get thrown in with some strangers but it works out way more than it doesn't. Worst case you get six hours of acceptable quality grouping and are out of the garbage...
Fifty-eight also fuck you.
Also also I went through The Dark Portal at 58 back in the day and it was actually a bit of a bitch. I did every single quest in Hellfire Peninsula and didn't feel good about my level moving forward. I wished I had waited until 60.
Gives you an idea the kind of response they got. It's a decent change but it's not going to undo much of the damage caused by the original announcement.
They may not be finished but at least there is a lot of them.
He's also got a trilogy with elementals and shit that people have spoken very highly of if you need more. That one has an ending.
EQ is just too winner-take-all for people to continue fighting for raid targets once they start losing. The next TLP they should set up the rules such that anyone within cast range of a boss in open world is temporarily PvP flagged. You'd see some competition then.