We agree with much of that, [@Darkmatter].

We suspect that many of the newer drift away due to two reasons:
1. their RPs not working out
2. some of the missing "basic" features.

Without delving into the big list of feature requests, we can think of one feature that should be simple to make:
a link from the recently online friends list on the right side to a complete list. Such can easily be a plain text window if nothing else.