I, too, find myself a little confused by this topic.

What's gained by losing the Persistent World? I admit, I was thinking about diving out of it myself - but I don't see any benefit from taking it off the site if other people are using it (even if that number is smaller than expected). I think it would be of benefit to try to tweak it to see if it could be more useful to RPers across the site - but there does seem to be some hate for it that I don't necessarily understand. 

So, I come back to my question - what does the site gain by taking down the Persistent World?