Man, a monthly fee would be so much better, except when they also think up of a ridiculous prize for that.
Probably seemed that way when you paid it without being sure what you'd get, but in retrospect that $45 has gotten you how many months of play? For me it's probably 1.5-2 years, or $2-3/month and getting cheaper the more months I play. Probably less than a subscription would've been. You're certainly right about subscription revenue providing an incentive to improve the game, but to some extent new-buyer revenue could do that too, so I guess maybe MF thinks they can attract enough new buyers to maintain the game long term? Who knows what their business people think, but at the price I paid, it's hard to knock the deal I've gotten so far.
For improving the online play experience, I still like something I threw out back when MF asked for feature requests on these forums: open the client source. Most games, I wouldn't bother suggesting such a thing, but this community has already proven it will contribute, see Salvager and arguably SCSN's mod to the new client. I'm not saying use a do-what-you-want OSS license like *GPL or Apache; it's reasonable for MF to want more control than that. I'm also not suggesting they open everything; give would-be contributors the front end, not the back end. We had that pre-Unity since the html and javascript was right there if one cared to read it, and the biggest result was Salvager. Maybe given the chance, we would do something that good again.