Not sure which mistake you're referencing, but I can respond to other bits of your post.
Factors which played into the stagnation of Red99:
1. Holocaust ban
This sent a message to the player base that Rogean was not ok with high end competition that might interfere with the top guild's ability to sit atop the server unchallenged for two years while running an RMT ring that Rogean et al were perfectly aware of.
Who wants to compete after Rogean sent that message?
2. Four years of Kunark
Not complaining ... it is what it is. I contributed jack shit to the thousands of hours of development it took to get to this point. When I posted on Reddit that Daybreak Games should hire the P99 staff, pay them for their invested development and run commercial, live P99 servers, I was actually being sincere. Yes, I was also taking the opportunity to troll the P99 staff for allowing Nizzar to run an RMT ring for two years, but my sentiment was nonetheless sincere.
Look at how the new TLP servers have turned out, with level 25 mages killing dragons. When Daybreak acquired EQ, they layed off most of the development staff. They simply can't afford to duplicate what P99 has done. It seems like an obvious solution to me ... let the P99 staff get paid for their work, sign a contract that allows them to continue running their free servers and put a P99 server on the live log in list.
I don't know if you've seen the subscription numbers for the current TLP servers, but I would expect a live P99 server to draw 5-10k subs for the first few months, which would make Daybreak potentially $75,000 plus a month for anywhere from six months to five years.
3. The
Crowfall conundrum
Not sure if you're following the development of Crowfall but I posted a thread in main server chat talking about how they solved the fundamental flaw of MMORPG's: the flaw of permanence. If you watch the intro video for Crowfall, they talk about how MMO's are like a game of Risk that lasts years. It becomes clear over time that one person is the winner. If there's no mechanic for the game to reset, then it stagnates. It eventually becomes fun only for that one person (representing the dominant guild in an MMO), and then eventually isn't fun for that person/guild when the rest of the audience leaves.
So what I proposed was a cyclical P99 server where you do three months of classic/kunark/velious then wipe it and start over. Rogean seemed to like the idea as he discussed it in a Sirken stream, proposing further that they could copy the characters onto the live server at the end of the cycle and prior to the wipe, so that you never actually lose your characters.
On a server like that, with a fully developed and tested velious at the end of it, the end game guild politics would be completely different.