melee can use mage, and range gear with no loss. That's fine. The only weapons used are scimitars. That's fine. Pure builds are insane abuse of knowledge, and stats. That's fine. We can't move past tier 75 without some dramatic change, or without making pvp capped at tier 75 gear. That's fine. Mining and smithing are wildly inconsistent and don't make sense. That is fine.

The minute we try to change these things it's not the same game.

Not quite sure agree. I mean some arguments make sense, like T75 for PvP and range/mage imbalance also makes sense because they are ranged, and they govern only 1 skill whereas melee governs 2. They aren't designed to be equal, and they don't need to be equal, and mage also offers utility in the form of teleports and other spells.

But for your other arguments, such as lack of weapon diversity or mining/smithing, I hardly agree that those are some core features to the game, or something that couldn't be fixed.

I honestly think you make them sound bigger issues than they actually are. Can you imagine people using longsword, mace, scimitar at Blue Drags instead of just Scimitar.. if you can imagine that, then how is that a problem for the game? Is that really something integral to OSRS? For me anyway, the usage of different weapons is mostly cosmetic with very minor gameplay enhancements to enforce the fantas(stabbing weapons being stabbing and so on).

So yeah, I agree that changing some of these flaws would fundamentally change how OSRS is as a game. For context, I view something like addition of new BiS like prim boots far bigger changes than more, mostly cosmetic variety for level 70 weapons.