Subscriptions are a sustainable way to do it, or so it seems from the games that have lasted 20+ years with decent player bases. I get where you’re going though, cash grabs are common in games nowadays and making a game a live service is a great way to do more monetizing, but it isn’t necessary.
I agree that it’s bittersweet to see a game change over time, and that is definitely a trade off of MMOs, but imo it’s not a total negative, a game having visible history in the world, when done well, can be a benefit.
Eshell because it is consistent cross platform and I switch often for work/etc. Sometimes I’ll use bash when I really want a native shell.
I used fish before eshell and I really like it, the auto complete is nice, but eshell has autocomplete and since aliases and other configurations are in my emacs config, they sync cross platform too.