If anyone actually plays it over Hamachi or Tungle, they're probably pirates. (I did install Tungle once to check out the activity and it seemed completely dead.)
Excuse me?!?
Many of us use Hamachi and Xfire for LAN games because it is often EASIER than dealing with ICO which in the past has dropped players, had LAG like crazy etc etc ...
For most of our games we play once every two weeks or so on Normal and Slow (using the DS mod as well as Vanilla) with five or six friends with the rest being AI ranging from Hard and above in difficulty and see how far we can get (typically about 6-8 hours till someone has to leave). We often start as a FFA and eventually teams emerge. It's a lot of fun and we all have legal copies that are updated via Impulse. Depending on your internet connection, OS etc it 'sometimes' seems that Hamachi gives better results when it comes to lag etc.
I have used ICO before and every now and then I still do. I just do not have the patience or the will to deal with the anxiety of Faster game play with and against complete strangers that can beat Unfair AI with one hand behind their back. Oh, did I mention they get angry when you have NO idea what the acronyms are or if you micro'ed an ability just a split second too slow? It's not a learning curve, they expect you to read their minds and if you can't they cannibalize you to the enemy.
We don't like being accused of being smurfs (took forever to find out what that meant because no one would tell us) and booted from games (simply because we don't have 5000000win/12loss records) and then when we finally get in a game we get cussed at, screamed at and then disowned and fed to the enemy because we're not 'good' enough. That's not fun.
You complain about no one new being in the online community? It's because everyone that's there doesn't WANT anyone new to show up apparently. No one has the 'time' to deal with 'newbs / smurfs / wtf are you?'. This is why we largely gave up on playing strangers online via ICO two years ago. It just was not worth it. If it's changed then sure, I guess we 'might' come back and likely will check it out when Rebellion arrives for sure but so far ICO for us has been a hard memory to forget. *shrugs*
Our group likes to relax, drink some drinks and play a game while joking about stuff etc. The people that THEY play with on sins outside of our group do the same thing. It's just the way it works and it's why we don't play 'online'.