Blame the wannabe mmorpg themepark angle they pursuing.
Oh, please. The game simply takes a more popular stand and is actually to some extent, becoming player friendly in terms of game-play. The server doesn't try to re-invent the wheel in a hipster fashion trying to make everything SO very unique (although the server stands out with their own unique solutions for convenient and fun game-play), but takes the proven values and the community requested suggestions to actually make it a better game. The server has basically appealed to players from just about all the communities so far.
That's progress.
FOnline 2 seem to be based around the same thing, let alone the projects that have yet to make any progress with the same idea (and hopefully they never do for reasons).
It's nothing remotely even close to 2238 or any of the other servers, except some copy paste dialogues from 2238 source.
Everything is custom made, the server was pretty much made from scratch. So it ain't no clone of any sort, this nonsense I heard when the FOnline2 was first announced. If I hear it now, there's something wrong with the player providing the same crap again.
Try FOnline2, you will not regret it. Just go read a couple of change-logs, maybe just the recent Wipe change-log
here. The topic also shows changes done in the previous Wipe. If that doesn't grab your attention, I assure you that nothing will.