I think most Mu players are over 25-30 nowadays, and most of us have families, jobs or other hobbies as well. Grinding for 1-2 years is simply not feasible for a lot of players. I really enjoy shorter "seasons" of Mu servers because i can experience the full game and the server usually "tells it's story" by then. For me at least, after 4-5 months a server starts to become a little tedious and like a second job, it's simply the nature of this game.
Having a long extremely hard server would be awesome, i admit it. But only the true hardcore players will stick around to see end game, and at some point new people will stop joining because it would be impossible to catch up with players that started 1 year before, for example. Low population servers are no fun for the players, and don't bring revenue to the admins. It's natural and a good thing to release a new edition.
This edition of NonRR was great from this point of view - there were a lot of new players coming in even after 4 months from the opening, and actually having a chance to compete at the highest level. We had a lot of players like this in NONE guild. This happened because of the custom settings, balance and features brought by the OS team. But these settings are the result of MULTIPLE editions of their servers, and they weren't perfect. A new edition is our chance to see an even more interesting and challenging server, and Staff's chance to refine their work and fix what was wrong.
Can't wait to play Phoenix