Poe, you can easily find out about the game from online reviews and check out videos of game footage on places like YouTube. I agree that it would be nice if the main websites of these types of games had more actual info about their game, but few do. At least Free Realms has the actual costs for membership and such on their site, unlike most other F2P games. I think of FR as more a F2T (free to try) these days, now they've changed what free players can do, although you can do the Adventurer/Collecting job and Card Duelist to level cap.

The FR download is small and you can check out all the jobs (up to level 5) for free now. Give it a try, all you'll be out is your time.

As to numbers of players, I've been playing since the final "beta/preview". The game had lots of players at first, then really seemed to lose most of them once school started. I pretty much stopped playing for about 2 months as well, mainly due to the broken race/derby jobs, but since the beginning of December the game seems even busier than at launch. Seems to be plenty of people playing, even in the morning. How the combat change (from Easy to Super Easy mode) will affect the game long term, I don't know. It does seem to have greatly increased the numbers of players since it was changed.

Perhaps the most overlooked new feature are houses. Not the houses themselves, but what people are building with the various design blocks. Slides, mazes, artwork, towers, all kinds of stuff. I'm really impressed with a lot of the things people have created and have gone from thinking of the new house feature as "meh" to "pretty neat!". Very pleasant surprise!