fix things that paying customers have complained about for years
I think you have a very different perspective on what paying for NC means. I've never paid for Neocities as a service the way a person might pay for Netflix. I do get some extra features that I make good use of as a supporter, and I see paying as a kind of verification layer to prove my site is not a spam bot or malicious.
However, I pay for Neocities because its providing tens of thousands of people with free homepages. I'm paying for those people to have homepages, and have them on a host that at least in some format I believe will survive for 20-200 years or more.
Neocities has never been a good deal for a price savvy and technical webcrafter looking for personal hosting, its always been slow and the main site has always been buggy, but that's never been the point.
I am of course a bit defensive of NC, and there are a few areas I'd like to see improvement, but there is no other host on earth that would have inspired me to make my site, or to keep it up the way NC has.
I just don't think NC owes me anything more than that, and I don't want to see people scared away from getting that out of it because they have been told its faults are worth more than its promise.