Wormholes

Your belief that what I have said is based on assumption is just that: your belief. Of course there are plenty of stories about people that POS up when a fight they cannot handle comes around. You might be lacking this one in your belief folder, but it happens in every type of space ranging from wardecs in empire to null blobs.

Small groups or solo players with poor skills that try to live in low class space with the sole purpose of making isk are either there because they don't know that incursions make more money in an essentially risk free environment with much less dependence on skills, or because they just want to live there. Some people just enjoy living in the not-really-unknown-but-occasionally-random area that is W-Space, and there are methods to catch these PvE-centric people with minimal effort. The reason I hesitate to mention them in my "text based on a wrong assumption" is because these people are painfully easy to extract content from. Buy a stealth bomber or two; these people will provide content whether they enjoy it or not.

Let's not start splitting hairs here. I'm happy that you acknowledge that there is a seizable group of people living in low class wormholes that are not looking for fights 24/7 but rather farm isk one way or another. Case closed.

Let me tell you a little story about people esp in C2s since you obviously know not much about it.
You can team up c1 and c3s and c2s with 4s but not 1+2 and 3+4 since they have completely different statics and playstyles.

Many of the notable alliances had a c2/4 and a c5/6 wing to cater to different playertypes. largerscale<>solo/smallscale hunting, access to lowsec, more connections<> static etc. Many of those lowend groups are actually still around (NOMAX posted here fe.)
But that was at a time when a static c3/4 was among the best isk/h and thus a great huntingground. Since then c5/6 farming became no longer a thing mainly for big groups but what we call the farmers. The influx of their loot and lesser demand for t3s (almost every nullbloc flew HMgus and it was the best rattingship. Then tierice, HM rebalance and dronebuffs happened) crashed lootvalues (1/3 on ribbons, even more on other stuff).
Also other incomes were buffed (ESS, dronemodules) or made available for small groups (renting no longer a thing only shady russians did) and new incomestreams were introduced (incursions).
So living in a c1-3 became less and less viable, no reason for new players or groups to come in.
I´m guessing about 90% of the fights happened in sites (ganking and baiting) or on holes (rolling). No more siterunners kills the first one (drakes in sites went from 20% bait to 99%) and rolling also slowed down because less people in space and even less needing sites to run.

Some cracy people even loved fighting on highsecs because it needed tricks and tactics. Now we have gates everywhere...

TLDR: c2/4s were awesome and populated, got worse every year, then got stabbed by the instasigs on the UI, now Hyperion came to kick the corpse.

I also tend to think that the folks supporting Hyperion are either new to wormholes and didn't know how much better things were back in the day, are living in the post-patch orgasm (C4s), are a fringe case, or are just plain ignant. +1

Can I be the fringe case? I'd like that very much thank you

Very nice post OP
We ofc can adapt and we indeed are, since I've just come into wspace
but that still does not overshadow the fact
that our EvE lives have just become a tad less enjoyable with very few new features for too much more hassle.
Yes, overview and bookmarks changes and sigs persistence are awesome. Frig holes are useless (well they can actually help when defending against evictions I guess), more random connections are for the lazy non-WHers who want easy hisecs, mass spew is a forced lucky-based patch to discourage a valid emergent gameplay (sugar rolling), incursion changes are an incentive for further low class evacuation, and dual C4 statics are a neutral with pros and cons.
So generally, a MEH expansion, 4/10 for the devs, nothing to see here.
Also, as OP said, the wormhole players form the most unique and awesome community in MMOs, the complexity, maturity and fun level is off the charts. A pity it won't probably stay so.