It's crazy that nobody can find servers running those golden-days of the game configs that are so superior to the modern state of the game. I wonder why?
I'll entertain this a little further; I offer you a formalized challenge for what you're implying here.
Paraphrasing your implication, "there are no, or very few, servers that provide an old-school experience."
The challenge is: show me you can actually make such a claim.
Not "show me there are only a handful", just that it could somehow be done.
In simple terms:
Take a snapshot of servers, from whatever public tool you like, or the in-game server search itself. A moment in time, having some hundreds of servers "online", selected somehow "fairly".
From those servers, count the number of modded ones (modding a server is another barrier to entry, that number will work as our denominator, modded_servers)
From those, figure out the set of servers that specifically and significantly modifies either the quest system, or the magazine crafting system, or both. This is not "oldschool" specifically, but I'm making the search task simpler by taking out the subjectivity of "oldschool", these two modifications are likely components of such. The sum of these servers will work as our numerator, potential_OS_servers)
Provide the ratio of (potential_OS_servers/modded_servers), but show us the work - focus mostly on the how, the actual numbers "at this moment" are relatively useless.
Should be easy enough for a maths guy?