abject failure as a company

The real problem is that we have no way of making people be dumb again. Consider, should DPG decide to address the issue by changing up all keying and epics by making entirely different NPC's in entirely different zones with entirely new dialogue and new drops in order to do keying and epic it would be widely known within a week and the situation would be the very same.

If a guild was raiding 2 ~ 3 expansions back on live servers that'd be a year or two out of era. On TLP, except for voting unlocks, that's around 6 months.

I understand that there are people who want to complete everything in era and those people very likely all quit before the game really gets interesting and return for the next round of TLP hoping that this time it'll be different

I don't think players were dumb even back on live, EverQuest is a game which really is knowledge -based rather than skill-based, and today even your regular noobs have people pointing them at knowledge bases like ZAM & EQResource and if they aren't doing that they are helping them out with their own knowledge.

Changing the quest in the way that you allude to wouldn;t really be addressing the issues on TLP either, the aim of TLP is not to create the same level of "I don't know what to do" that EQ used to have or otherwise they would have spent thousands of hours completely re-writing quests and creating new npc's and that was always going to be too expensive on dev time to do. All it takes is some changes like the ones that have already been made, just taken further.

There really haven't been ANY "out of era" raiding guilds on TLP that I know of, if the guild was unable to raid in-era they imploded either losing players to the next TLP, other guilds or to no longer playing EQ. So I don't think that TLP have had any real comparison to how Live servers were or are now, on TLP everyone is in an End-game guild pretty much, there are little to no family/casual guilds as almost no casuals exist on TLP.

Yep, pretty close to 100% of the TLP populations so far.

The bleed-off of players on TLP so far has been fairly steady at 1-3 guilds lost per expansion, servers with no-Truebox have fared a bit better on retention. Ragefire did have a hard drop off point when Phinny launched and for a few months after then it stabilised some but since Phinny TLP haven't really had hard drop offs in players, the next TLP launching has had an effect on each prior TLP but not a drastic one.

Perhaps they have seen that things do change on TLP over time, that each TLP that plays through content has its feedback for the devs to take on board, if every TLP there is a problem with the VP key it's sending a clear message back to the devs that players generally don't like its roadblocks despite a few liking it the old way.
Same thing goes for epics, some of the epic bottlenecks have been addressed while some yet remain.
So maybe thinking that the next TLP will be better isn't entirely wrong either.

if you think your epic is important in 2020 you have other issues

Epics should be unlocked with velious.

Ask Trump for his way