I found out about the game way too late. It's all I ever wanted and was on the Eastern Front to boot.
Believe me, there's been times where I was close to leaving. There's just a few individuals and the cameraderie I share with them that keeps me coming back. Also, being able to be a squad leader and just lead my guys to success is really rewarding and mentally challenging.
I've heard the horror stories from the 181st Tank Brigade. I hear they really shaped the German realism units into something formidiable because of how much the Axis units got wrecked time and time again. I really have to commend you on your satchel kill!
Probably my best experience in an actual battle would be directing MG fire into an unsuspecting enemy squad at long distance or picking off an infiltrator with my MP. Throw in the occasional suicide charge through MG fire and running into an objective between artillery salvos, counting on the man next to me not to take a hit since he's the only one with a panzerfaust well... you can't trade in those tense moments for anything!
It's now being led by Hoffmann, Reinhard long gone from being active, though he showed up a few times just to check in during my time in.
Ostheim was doing his own thing with the 24.Panzer in RO2 and then 12.SS in Iron Front: Liberation 1944 but retired in a sense. Schweitzer shows up occasionally, but the pessimistic bastard can't bring himself to do trainings with us right now.
Well, up until about 2-3 months ago everything was fine with RO1 and its mods such as Darkest Hour and Mare Nostrum until some sort of server glitch hit where you'd have either 1-2 servers show up or none at all. TWI completely ignored fixing it and it still plagues the game today. It's since then killed most of the community.