The truth? General nostalgia.
Things were different back then (and wow do I feel old saying that) with regard to the community in general. This was before the age of RTB where you knew where people were at any given time, so people tended to have 'home' servers that they spent a lot of time on. This created a general sense of community on servers that were up all the time that simply doesn't exist much anymore outside of admin circles. Clans were also actually somewhat of a thing, they were never super popular but people did bind together which was cool to experience. The playerbase seemed more localized, you'd see the same people over and over again rather than joining a server and seeing nobody you know. As far as feature sets went, v9 was probably the version with the single most things available. And it was well utilized -- v8-v11 was definitely the 'golden age' of Blockland scripters. That was a huge one. No offense meant to any current scripters (myself included), but the scripters that were around in v9 were better than you. NiXiLL, Trigun, Truce, Ephialtes, etc. However, they've all pretty much left for the same reason: Badspot's attitude towards modders and development of the game.
