I'll throw in my two cents.

First off, there's obviously no perfect system or silver bullet that's going to suddenly make everyone inspired and motivated to churn out lovingly crafted posts on the daily.  Every format change, every shakeup in the status quo, is going to have strengths and weaknesses, and holes can be poked in all of them.  The current format has its own strengths and weaknesses, which we've griped about at length in the Discord chat.

As I see it, the major strength of the free-form sandbox RP is that it gives players total license over their character, and allows them to flex their creative muscle and show off how clever and unique their take on a character can be.  It gives us the opportunity to tell stories we want to tell, and -- especially in the case of DC, where many of us have been dissatisfied with the state of the official canon for a long time-- allows us to "do it right."  The major weakness of this, however, is that it is entirely dependent on the player's creative muse-- if they're having a bad day, if they had a solid initial concept but then don't know where to go with it, if nobody else is posting and they don't feel urged to post themselves, then players drop out and the game slows down.

Personally speaking, I'm a big fan of tabletop-style roleplaying games, where the Game Master directs the events of a story, where the players operate within a defined set of rules, and perhaps most importantly, where there is the possibility of failure.  A group of adventurers exploring a goblin cave isn't tense and exciting because there's anything inherently tense and exciting about goblins, it's tense and exciting because the goblins [i]can kill you.[/i]  On the other hand, the weakness of a GM-led tabletop style of game is that it funnels the players into a handful of options, which is stifling if you want to do your own thing.  Plus, you have to be very careful about how much complexity you add into a system, since the appeal of forum-based RPGs is that you don't need to memorize a 300-page rule book.  I do have a system that I have put together, and am going to put up an Interest Check, but it is purely meant to be an experiment to see if it works, not a replacement for the game as it exists.

As for the current state of DCU:G, I think a slight time skip might do some good.  Because nobody has made their big public debut yet, everyone's either in hiding or on the run or operating in the shadows or whatever, which makes it harder to do big set-pieces or have reasons to cross paths and interact.  Perhaps jumping forward a couple of months so that there are at least a couple of capes out in the open can free things up a bit.  Though again, that also has its weaknesses, as it steps on the toes of people who are working on a big origin-story arc.

Long story short......I dunno, you can't please all the people all the time, it is what it is.