Well, being a Midgard transplant, I don't know how much I can say. Tho yes, I know most people found our asshats first..Asshats tend to be louder and more visible. Nice players tend to be more in the background.
The merge did bring some history with it, so don't know if it improved it any. Midgard was where most of the PS2/PC beta players went to; had one of the oldest HNM shells (Valor/Virtus/Eightbit) tho that's gone, and I admit, I heard of some drama/botting too. I wasn't involved in a lot of HNM by choice; got to hate camping nms pretty early on. We had some really good players too, some have worldshifted/quit but some are still there. The trouble is finding them, b/c as I said, nice players tend to stay more in the background. Can't say much about PUGs b/c I mostly did stuff with CTY back then(plus there wasn't a lot to PUG back then), tho I had a good record of finding good PUG xp/merit groups before the merge.
I think people have just gotten lazy, I sure have lately. Been mostly doing Legion and Salvage and also helping a friend of mine get her armor done in Abyssea (she's down to the last two pieces to +2 now; if her RL cooperates we should have that done in a couple more weeks) and once Dem and Klaital get the expansion we're planning on doing missions in that. May be doing NQ Nyzul to help yet another person get Floor 100 until that pair get it. ^^ (They had a rl move to deal with and are having to budget the money for 2 copies of the expansion, so I'm not putting any pressure on them at all to get; I'm thinking the first missions could be soloed anyway.)