You are overlooking something.
If AH was being started up on 1\1\15 with FPS troop only Free to Play advertised, Or, $14.95 to get the full monty, sure, hunky dory. Then the game would have a large in and out population of freeloaders doing everything they can to screw and grief the slow growth group of full paying customers. HiTech under those conditions would probably have to relent and give them a limited plane set to entice upgrading to full pay status.
Today we have customers who have been with this game for 15 years paying faithfully every month on time. And now some paying and no longer playing customers want what they pay for to be given away with a very good chance of creating a permanent population of freeloaders who will grief the paying customers at any chance to rub it in. Among those many are current paying customers who would drop their full pay subscriptions in a heart beat to become free loaders. That is what the old HtH free arenas created instead of a staging area to entice players to upgrade to full paying and get all of the benefits. No one ever saw that ugly side of the free HtH because the two arenas never crossed paths.
It's amazing how many players want to spend HiTech's money for him, to get a free ride off some other group of players backs. Deja Vu...hmmmm I've seen this phenomenon somewhere in the real world. Welfare state and Atlas Shrugged comes to mind.
The idea that people currently paying will stop paying because of the addition of a feature that doesn't currently exist is insane
The idea that the community should be restricted to the current 27 people who still play this game so that you don't have to deal with new players and the occasional griefer is insane (though if that's what the current community wants then, by all means, that's exactly what they deserve)
The idea that this game has a snowball's chance in hell of getting new life breathed into it without dramatic changes is insane
There was certainly a lot of overlap between H2H and paying subscribers especially because H2H players could use the forum. I certainly remember flying H2H with frequency. Occasionally it was unpleasant but hey
People played back then
(when was H2H shut down, 2008? that actually correlates pretty close to the number peak yeah? obviously that didn't primarily contribute to anything but it's a funny coincidence)
The unnecessary wordiness of your post combined with the weird, almost fatalistic blind elitism leveled against the people who are needed for a healthy community makes the Ayn Rand allusion at the end strangely beautiful. I'm waiting eagerly for the obligatory follow up post about how recreational sex is for pond scum because worthwhile people have better things to do.
(all that said I think that the idea that HTC can just 'whip up' a FPS and that anyone will want to play it and that it will rejuvenate the game is a bit naive)