I think you just inadvertently supported my arguments. For example, the Excellent items I found so far were—personally—mostly useless because of the overpowered items in medals. Items from medals should be transitional, or as you said: 'consumable', not the monster drops. Instead, medals render 99% of the regular monster drops useless. Excellent items used to be "Holy fuck I found an excellent item," now it's just "Meh, let's see what option it has."
About socket or ancient items I can't comment because I indeed have no experience with those. However, that's not necessary for my points to be legitimate. Some people play slow or infrequently, others play a lot. If an economy is mainly focussed around end game items, it's only 'fun' for hardcore players. Similarly to my elf, I've been using a Sword of Destruction+10+4+Luck from the first day I started playing with my knight. In the meantime I've found items from monsters that I would've have been psyched about to find if it weren't for those medal drops. What makes gameplay fun is pleasant surprises. These medals aren't. Now it's just a deluge of items that mostly go unused, or just sold in shop.
I'm no economist, but I think if items were much harder to find, then the economy would work both ways, jewels from beginners to experienced players, and items from experienced player to beginners. I feel like infrequent or beginner players have nothing to contribute or nothing to look out for.
Newer players—personally speaking—don't want to catch up, they want to get good, with pleasant surprises and fun gameplay. If the latter conditions are true, they will catch up anyhow. What this server does well is rewarding active players more than AFKing, but it could do it even better.
Brainstorm
Idea #1: drastically increase price of AFK mechanism so AFKing can't be done indefinitely on monster zen drops alone. This makes zen more valuable. AFKing should still be relatively easy, but doing so should stimulate the economy, not deteriorate it.
Idea #2: I think the helper bots are silly (but the intention behind it is honest). Just as the struggle of weight lifting followed by eventual success (or practicing any other skill) is the cause of satisfaction, so should be the struggle of leveling. When you're small and weak you look at people bigger than you and think "Damn, I want to be like that. If I work hard at it I can be like that as well." Sadly, what is fun about standing next to a bot until you're level X? Yes beginners level up faster, but it leaves a part of the economy, and fun, untapped. It also disincentivizes exploring maps for good spots that are suitable for your skill level. The more you hold people's hand, the more they'll want their hands to be hold, but counterintuitively, the less fun they'll be having and the less inticed they'll be to stay on the server.
Idea #3: What is unique about Mu? Not the rarity of jewels, but the vast amount of possible combinations of items. Everyone can look unique due to the amount of different items, and the beautiful shaders of upgraded items. These item shaders are still better looking than any modern MMORPG in the world. You should take use of that. The fact that over the years the game has been added with many more features is a reason we've got to get past the idea that a single bless and soul must be extremely rare. Instead, let Bundles of Bless or Soul +30 be the new benchmark for rare. Only put beginner +7 (without +luck +option) items in medals, and beginner items +0 (without +luck +option) in NPC shops, and let the players make stuff +11 and beyond. This is what's fun, and because of it people will start using zen and jewels for trading more as the chaos machine costs zen, and failing costs items.
Swearing and quitting doesn't solve anything. Having a healthy in-game economy is incredibly hard to pull off. Admins or players are not doing this maliciously. Did you know that games like EVE Online employ economists to make their in-game economy work?
Anyway, this was all written in short bursts, off the top of my head, so pardon my occasional incoherence.
