A truly classic experience is one that retained all of the best parts of classic, ie: no POK books, and no expansions yet. So the experience you have, and the environment you're in is immersive, nostalgic, and rewarding.
The experience penalty as you've pointed out was introduced to counter-act what they believed to be classes that could do more than one thing, hybrids, or classes with special bonuses. Back when Everquest was the ONLY game available this was important as it was an entirely new concept: "Hey, if you want to play a warrior/cleric combo, that's fine, but we're penalizing you 40% exp for it. At end levels you'll be able to tank raid bosses, rez, buff, and heal pretty well).
However, with the release of every major game in history, this original experience became less original. Coming back to the game now, almost all of us have experience playing other MMO's, and probably a lot of us have done things like end-game raiding in WoW in which almost EVERY class can serve more than one purpose.
So, looking at it now, experience penalties placed on hybrid classes was a feature of 1999 that isn't a feature anymore as the uniqueness of playing a hybrid died with 10 years of new games. As such, I fully support the removal of experience penalties. I think it would be a welcome change.
All in all, what we need to agree on (hopefully) is that while classic everquest is by far and away the best thing that's happened to the MMO community in a long time, we can't be dictators about it and cold-cut everything that wasn't 1999. The developers need to recognize that the BEST parts of 1999 are already captured on this server, they've succeeded in doing that. At this point we're not gaining more players, we're holding strong where we are. If we begun to look at small changes, creature comforts, it would even further increase the experience.
/2 cents.
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