* Jacek, your concern that newbies cannot find the best in SL is very true (it sure took *me* a while). I hope it may be somwhat remedied when the Linden experiment comes to fruition, and Welcome Area functions are handed over to well-qualified 3rd parties who actually might care to do a good job of newbie guidance.

* Free money is a common fantasy, true enough — so many people do seem to enter SL with an idea that they can make real money, or at least live the good SL life without putting any real $ into it. Many do managee the latter, of course, with clever freebie shopping — and there’s that newbie guidance issue again. I sometimes advise people to go work at McDonalds for a few hours, then quit and use their wages to finance the rest of their Second Life. It would beat wasting weeks of realtime on camping chairs!

* It’s hard to get too excited about lack of traffic in RL vendors’ venues. If “traffic” was actually buying them something, they’d expend the imagination and effort to make their venues worth visiting, and better known. Why would I visit a virtual Gap when I could visit Truth instead?

* The other Rose complaints are essentially on technical limitations and implementation issues, not social issues. Only more Linden investment money will solve those ;-)

Hamlet and Frank’s discussion dovetails well with Gwyn’s recent essay entitled “I’m Bored”.

There remains a major challenge of getting new residents over that initial hump, of helping them find people and activities which will draw them back and engage them. But as you present them, most of Rose’s comments are valid, if also being issues that you learn to live with (and tend to gloss over, as Hamlet may have done) once you commit to SL.