I'm not quite sure what you mean. At least on our grid, we have all those features (other than their marketplace and economy). If anything we are technologically superior. I always felt like I'd been wandering around in a dirty, decaying wasteland where nothing works, in SL... and logging back in to OpenSim is like coming home to Wakanda. lol Generally when any new features are implemented in SL, it takes them years and years to roll out. And it takes us about 3-6 months to catch up and implement the new features here, and they just wind up working better on our end.
The church idea... I am actually emulating what we currently have in SL. They have two full regions out in the middle of the ocean, that cost close to $600/mo. About half my RL mortgage. About 10 or 15% of the time, one of their regions is down, or causing problems for the other one. Unless you are a single, isolated sim in SL, that is usually the case.
The church area that I created on our grid is 54 SL sized regions in land area, and surrounded by a HUGE mainland. You can sail a boat or take a train ride from there and travel and explore for hours without really hitting a snag. That is possible on the mainland in SL, but it's definitely not much fun. There are ban lines and regions down everywhere, all around you.
As far as the sheer numbers of people, and the old real estate adage "location, location, location!". At least as far as the church community goes, that has not been the case. Wayyyyy back in the day, when SL was hot, and had a lot of excited people. We would get a lot of new traffic. For the past 10 years, every weekly service, we might see one or two new faces. And they were usually a griefer. lol We would gain maybe one or two interested members per year. So for a project like this. SL literally has no advantage whatsoever. In OpenSim we can attract a lot of new people, and just have a much nicer, bigger, lag free and less distracting environment. That whole 54 region area... costs me maybe like $3 or $4 to host. It is nothing. It is as close to free as you can get. :)
like(0)