To clarify the above, this assumes there is no intervening legal or ethical policy and/or standard being crossed.

I've been with company's that give away full access way to easily and others that hoard it like a miser. Neither is right nor wrong (although too much access given to too many people would make me extremely nervous) and depends on how the company operates. Being in a similar position as the OP, I'd want full access to everything. If the company is hesitant, have them make you sign a security agreement. If they won't go that far, take what they give you and work with that. Eventually you'll get full access through need in my experience.

Depends the infrastructure. I don't care if the company has 1 employee, if the infrastructure is comprised of over 1000 active VMs, then it's a big company imo.

^ this

Having been a programmer for over 25 years, I'm seeing more and more older people starting new careers in programming today. It's not uncommon for one of our new developers to be 40+ and be on to their second (or even third) careers. Stability in older employees being a large mitigating factor over youth (or so it was explained to me). I think you have a good future ahead of you if the nature of the work keeps you interested and you understand that this is an ongoing learning experience. If you're looking to transition into a Senior Architect or Lead Developer role you may be in for an uphill battle but not an insurmountable one (depending on interest, skills and dedication to the craft).

Not precisely accurate ... as the game gets older, the client starts to include previous expansions. I just restarted my EQ2 account and the client came with all of the expansions up through the last two (that's 7 of the 9 expansions).

While you will (and currently do) have a number of titles moving to the MMO model specifically to milk a rising niche in the games market, you are also seeing many MMOs starting to fail (Horizons, Matrix Online, London: Hellgate, etc ...). You will always have some graff in any market but considering the production costs of an MMO (much greater then your average console game) I think the less substansive MMOs will start to weed themselves out (Champions Online is a good example of this).

I think the "grind" formula works at the lowest levels (basic carrot on a stick psychology) so is the most easiest to adopt for most game developers who tend to try to focus their efforts on glitzier aspects of their game. Of course in a game you really enjoy you tend to notice very little of the "grind" so grinding in general is very subjective. For my tastes, I prefer an MMO that goes out of its way to create as real a virtual world as possible. MMOs with shortened worlds and more "stream lined" mechanics tend to get me bored quicker (i.e. notice the grind faster). EQ, EQ2 and WoW are good examples of fairly well fleshed out MMO worlds with good physics and indepth levels of play (true Z-axis, gravity, water, friction, quests/crafting/meta games, thriving economies, etc ...). WAR, Shadowbane and Champions Online are good examples of "niche" MMOs that I don't care for. Very limited in scope and play styles. Most current mainstream (i.e. not F2P) MMOs fall in between those two models in my mind (DAoC, Aion, City of Heroes, SWG, etc ...).