Ok, after reading the entire thread I feel like responding.  While I have never played Lineage 2 as soon as I get back home from vacation I am going to give it a try.  I am a long time player of Final Fantasy XI and have 4 Lv75's so to say grinding is a problem for me its not.

However americans are LAZY.  They want everything here and now.  They don't want to invest to much time into something because in 6 months most of them are bored of even the best MMORPG's and on to something else.  As a country our attention span doesn't exist.  This is the reason that games like WoW are so widley popular.  Within 2 weeks you can be capped and OMGUBERLEET!  That is all people care about anymore, no one wants to work for anything, hence why FFXI was never widley popular with american players.

I live in Japan currently and the ONLY game that gets played at LAN Centers in Japan in Lineage II.  Nothing else even comes close.   A few people play RF Online or FFXI, but 95% of the people play L2.

Now if the only REAL complaint I see here from people who won't play L2 is, "The grind is to long." Just sounds a lot to me like, "I don't want to work to get to level cap."  After over a year of hardcore playing of FFXI I finally reached Lv75.  Of course the next three only took me roughly 2-3 months of playing to reach 75 each, but that was after i had all missions, quests, etc completed.

With the release of Treasures of Aht Urgan I contemplated going back to FFXI, but I think I'm going to give one last MMORPG a shot since everything else has failed miserably.  I tried WoW(Garbage), I tried EVE(joke click button mine rocks, click button auto fire at a dot in the sky WOO!), I treid EQ2, I tried Guild Wars, but they all lack in depth and end game that FFXI could give me so much excitement(Claim Nidhogg for the first time anyone?).  So before I go back to FFXI for good, Expect to see me running around Lineage 2 for the next few months giving it an honest effort.  If I enjoy it(And not to say I just live to grind away for hours on end, but I play to reach end game in games not the level up.  I use that time to make friends) expect to see me there indefinatley until something better comes out(And by the looks of it its going to be years!).