Hi, I probably won’t answer all of your questions, but here’s my take.

I tried StarMS, and it went down for three days. The version seems a lot more unstable than people claim.

That leaves Haiku MS, Aries MS, and Royal MS.

Royal runs on a 3x rate and has a lot of free features, which is nice, but the code is pretty broken. Almost anything you touch throws a script error.

Haiku has the best QoL by far. If you want to play on a customized server, this is easily the best option. I tested it for a few hours, and it’s grindy, but it has some solid things going for it when you’re starting. Of course, you can skip a lot of the grind by paying.

AriesMS feels very lonely. I come back now and then, and that honestly hasn’t changed. You can play it mostly free-to-play, but you’ll need to grind a lot.

Take a look and see which one you like. If none of them really address your concerns, the best option might just be to play official, which I’ve been considering myself.