I just recently started playing again too having stopped just after the Architect issue (2009?). I do miss the commuting. Made it feel like a real city having to switch trains! Maybe I'm just too much of a car driver irl so this seems fun to me but I always did enjoy just super jumping and speeding around the city.
I do also miss sweeping hazard zones in teams as lowbies. This seems to be replaced by the dfb trial and bypassed by early travel powers. With the merit meta there is simply less reward too compared to tfs, trials, and mission arcs. It would be nice to do this again with some nostalgic old players. Maybe some sort of thing can be set up to incentize sweeping like merits for killing x mobs in a zone that con at least green to you.
Overall I feel like people are just richer compared to back when I stopped. I think super efficient ae farming haven't become a thing yet then so overall there were fewer fully built people. I guess merits weren't a thing either. Also the top end was less high of course.
This is of course anecdotal but I don't think people are any more or less nice to newbies and ignorants (that's me!). There always are a good supply of helpful people. I do feel that there are much fewer truly new to the game people. That is just the nature of things. I'm sure somewhere there is a list of common acronyms but I have just asked or creepily monitored the chat to deduce its meaning. Sovera's guide has been extremely helpful for everything for me to start back up.
https://forums.homecomingservers.com/topic/14433-simple-guide-for-newcomers-money-making-amongst-other-things/