I want to settle down on Legends, but I've got some questions

So I've been wanting to get back into Maplestory lately, but I don't think I want to go back to MapleRoyals. Just a while ago, I made a thread in General Discussion talking about the state of Private Servers (and I promise I'm not saying this as a shameless self-insert, I was just throwing that out there for context), and in that thread, I mentioned that Royals doesn't seem to be very well-liked outside of its own cult-following of a playerbase. I used to have no idea why other people didn't like Royals, and assumed that it was just the fact many Maplers are loyal to only one or two servers and generally don't like the others. I personally had a fairly positive experience with Royals back when I was super active 3-4 years ago. The people I met were fairly friendly, and I didn't have any issues with the GMs/Administration. However, I've talked to a few people who had negative experiences with the community and the administration. I've also heard talk of how their server's economy is in a bad state at the moment.

So at this point, I'm willing to believe that maybe Royals isn't that great of a server despite its popularity and maybe it's time to leave. Personally, I'm kinda tired of trying to keep up with their community, since everyone seems to be in such a hurry to leech and HP wash their main DPS character up to bossing standards, and that's pretty much the name of the game for everyone.

/start rant
Honestly, when I played pre-BB Maple on the official servers, I could care less about the "meta" of the game. My friends and I just played Maplestory like any other RPG, playing the classes that we wanted to play, and playing them the way we wanted to. But in a lot of "nostalgic" servers like Royals, it seems everyone just HAS to play the "meta" of old-school Maple. By meta, I basically mean how only the best DPS classes (like NL, Bowmaster, and Corsair) are wanted for boss runs, and since boss parties don't usually include a DK and their lovely Hyper Body buff, that means all the DPS players have to HP Wash. So essentially, your first character has to be a bishop so that you can farm/sell leech in order to Hp-wash AND fund your actual main character. Which just isn't the way I like to play Maple. I mean I guess I could just not worry about bossing at all and only worry about leveling...but I digress.
/end rant

Anyway, sorry for the rant. In any case, I'm just kinda curious as to what kind of negative experiences other people had on Royals and what Legends does better. Like I said above, I'm totally willing to believe that Royals has the issues that people say it has. I just want a few more examples to go off of so that I can make an informed decision before leaving their server behind for good.