I moved this to General since it didn’t have a very specific call to a feature or bug, with Kumi’s approval.
First, about lore: That can be pretty loose! Because a good chunk of Sinder’s soft-lore is that it’s the coming together of different shards of reality through the rift. It’s lore that manages to be lightweight and at the same time accommodates different lore segments in different areas. (except in extreme cases and that’s what you’d want your own Mucklet Realm for when that happens.)
Greeting: We’ve decided for now to let this be a bit… organic, happening out in the park. The reason is something that surprised us too (and is documented a bit on this forum): We found as often as not that people didn’t react positively to being engaged by Tom. In some cases they ran, usually out to the park. I’m not sure why that is, but so far it’s a thing. He’s not going anywhere though. 
Areas: Good ideas all. It’s somewhat important to have a built in community or purpose in mind, to some extent we don’t want ‘dead’ areas building up, which I talk about in this thread. Have a look at the Building and Areas board for more, too! And there’s nothing stopping you from getting started disconnected from the grid. It can always be connected.
Support: These are good ideas, let’s see what Boss Wolf says. We’re currently trying to restructure things a little behind the scenes to take pressure off him and let him concentrate more on features and bugs.
One nice thing about the software that runs Wolfery is that it runs well, even on ‘potato hardware’ as we used to call the old tiny server. It’s not like the old days of mucks where you had to find a rack with internet access and power and…