I'll weigh in as a person that is currently playing Darkfall. Here are some facts:
1. The siege system is 100% improved, but still needs some work.
2. The grind is comparable to other games now. Take that was you will.
3. Darkfall even with all it's faults still has the best PvP of any MMO by far.
4. Now that a good portion of the population is reaching the 'end game', AV is scrambling to add 'end game' type content.
5. Magic is still king, but it is very close to balanced with melee with the addition of splash damage and buffed resists on heavy armor.
6. The cost of grinding is balanced now. You can actually farm in small groups or solo and it will be worth your time.
7. You can now farm in large groups and it be very worth your time. Example killing the Yssam dragon (they added a real one), yielded about 175k worth of loot between 8 people. If you recall back in the day, it took 5 people to kill thainliches which dropped 80 gold each.
8. Offline skilling is being patched in tomorrow along with anti-swimmer defense for ships, which makes ships an actual threat now.
9. War Dec mechanics are being adjusted in many ways to close loop holes. Some are getting patched in tomorrow.
10. Siege exploits using 1 man proxy clans to avoid property loss and other consequences is being addressed. (bye bye Rerolled LOL clan )
11. Regional banking crowd is winning and that will be coming soon.
12. Banks will be upgradable so enemies can't use them in your own city. I think that might be in tomorrow's patch.
13. They have admitted (finally) that the alignment system is broken. They are currently working on fixing loop holes that allow alignment farming and ways to make being blue a good thing.
14. They are still working on adding racial specific skills to actually make them different. Basically, they are still trying to get 4-leg run in the game, but are trying to create something equally cool for each races.
15. If/When they fix the alignment system and faction systems, they will offer a race change option.
16. They added rare ore to regular nodes, so people without a mine can still get good armor and weapons.
DF2010 (or whatever it will be renamed) will truly change the game. Right now, everyone basically plays a hybrid class. With all the different good spells and skill spread out across multiple schools and skills, it forces you to have them all to compete. That is why the grind is so horrible. You basically need all your skills maxed out, currently. All that stuff above is great, but DF2010 is really what most of us are waiting on. DF2010 is basically going to change the game a good bit. DF will become a load out system. There will be prestige classes which I assume will block some skills (reducing the grind even more) and open up a few class specific ones. It will add play style specific armor, again load out style speccing. If done even close to right, DF will be worth playing again. It will add in a completely new UI, which is a HUGE problem with the current game. I don't know why but simply closing the chat window boosts my FPS by 120. They are completely upgrading all the graphics and sounds in DF2010 to support DX11. All the numbered stuff and the stuff in this paragraph, I expect to be done before or in the DF2010 xpac.
Conclusion:
If you want to play, I'm sure some of us can find you a place to live and will be more than happy to help you out. We have the knowledge to actually help get you up to fighting level as fast as possible now, but there is a flip side to that. DF2010 will change everything it seems and you might do a good bit of grinding for stuff you might end up never using again. That's my main worry. I just finished my character. I literally have 100 in every magic school with 75+ in every useful offensive spell. I have 100/100 great sword. I have 75+ in every attribute and capped in some. When DF 2010 comes out and if there is a paladin type PC, I'm sure it will require me to block about 75% of my magic skills and schools I grinded out. So, you can see why I said you might want to wait, so you don't waste time. If you want to come back and play as a destroyer/mage killer that will basically guarantee you don't grind anything you don't need or spend anymore than you need to, but you won't be as effective in solo fights as a hybrid. You will rape in large fights, though.The game is fun and REAL fixes are coming. As far as Virakar reforming and getting that much interest, I wouldn't even try to convince anyone to do that until DF2010. If it is half what they say, you won't need to convince them to play.
Here is a video of good players being destroyers. This is even before the magic splash damage/armor rebalance and most of the changes that have happened. It still represents modern DF combat pretty well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NSarDJo3zw