I was of this same mindset at a different community, the will and need to reboot to put everyone on equal footing was a thought in my mind. However, there's some OOC concerns to consider:
1) Trust issues. Imagine rebooting willingly - you'd have to consider the player base. A lot of people who have been here from the beginning would be demanded to restart their stories, their characters. Many would likely bounce, and those that stayed would hold Staff - and it's leader - in contempt.
2) Back to square one. The map is something we all look to when examining the "game" aspect of this role-play community, and a lot of people have put a lot of work into getting their Major Factions to where they're at. That'd be undone, all in one night. This would greatly affect the rules - and a need to change them - as the rules are very adaptive to the current situation of the community. Alterations would need to be made.
3) There's just short of 90 factions total. What would happen to them? Do we delete them all? What about the work that's been put into them... going back to #2 and #1 of this post.
4) The Factory. Rebooting just killed everything in the Technology/Starship sector... or made it obsolete/archaic, depending if we either wipe the slate clean or jump forward in time.
5) The Events. Sure, I think we can all agree we wouldn't miss the last couple of events. But the ones before them were pretty rad - rebooting just killed those stories, too.
6) The people with +90 characters - would kill me.
7) There's no need to reinvent the wheel. What we're doing is working. I examine the stats for this website weekly, if not daily. I don't obsess about them as much as I did in the early days, but Google Analytics shows daily growth. We're getting 1500+ unique visits a day, give or take a few hundred spiders/bots. Back when we first started, we were getting 10. Depending on the rework we'd do, our google ranking - the major attraction for this website - would plummet.
8) I've gotten pretty lazy. As the main director of this website's Staff team and web development, I'd have to do a metric crapton of work for a reboot. Work I don't wanna do. 'cause I've already done it once.
9) A new backstory - or would we just start with the gulag plague again? Looking back, I feel like inventing this website's main timeline revolving around a "reboot" plague was the best creative decision I've given this website. I don't think I could capture that lightning in a bottle again, and even if I tried - we're back at #8.
10) Splinter communities would undoubtedly form with promises of "we won't reboot you!". This would fracture the community and create unwanted competition.
Are we afraid? No, I don't think we are, 'cause to admit we're afraid to reboot means that we don't know what would happen. I've got a good idea of what would happen, and the bad would vastly outweigh the good. I value the freedom and want for open-mindedness this community has, and I cherish "what if" discussions because sometimes, some people come up with good ideas that others (or even the originator) follow through with.
But this "what if" discussion has an endless amount of possibilities - something SWRP, in it's current form without rebooting, already possesses.