May I present to you Planeshift. The very first (and I do mean very first) free to play MMORPG.
And also Eternal Lands, another extremely early free to play MMO developed by only a handful of people.
I've personally played both (and even helped out with Planeshift's development since anyone can volunteer;) and while their communities may be small, they're all extremely loyal and friendly. Both of these games have been up since before World of Warcraft, and I don't think they're going anywhere any time soon.
You gotta be kidding me, I am one of the oldest EL player and there is no reason to respect this guy at all after what he has done, the guy you call "Radu" actually the owner of the game... He made an account in game like it was a random player and bought all the Cash Shop items called "Rostogol Stones" from most of the players in game, upon dying this item allows you keep your whole inventory and lose only the stone. He bought most of them to milk of players like push them to buy more. The game was ruined by the amount of alts, someone made a video soloing the most difficult instance with multiple account. You will never catch the top 10 players maybe if you play straight 10 years... what I recommend is the private server called Other-Life but there is literally no updates what so ever and the population is very low as expected. There is also a French private server Landes Eternelles.
As far as I know, there are no such sites. I know because I have my own indie MMORPG, Eternal Lands and we don't have any links from a site dedicated to Indie MMORPGs. There are some sites for indie games, but non (that I know of) for MMOs.
Try Eternal Lands. It doesn't have fixed classes, but you usually can't be everything at once. But you can change your build on the fly. The world is not huge, but it is big enough, and there are lots of secret areas. There are also over 200 NPCs with their own stories, etc. Not a lot of quests, 50 or so only, but they are better than just "go kill 10 rats". I mean, there are complex quests and simple quests as well.
The end game is very far, it takes 3+ years to reach it, but it's fun along the way.
P.S. Full disclosure: It's my game.
I played a game back in the day called Eternal Lands. It's remarkably similar to runescape, but dated and lacking population. I enjoyed the hell out of it when I played it, though.
I swear to God someone asks this literally twice a day. lol
These are pretty much your only options for a relatively good experience. Even an older MMO like EverQuest would tax Intel's HD 2000 after several graphical updates.
I played Eternal Lands for quite some time some (many) years ago. While the graphics where back then not state of the art it was quite enjoyable and it is completly free. Also the player base was always nice.
I don't think people are going to see the appeal of playing a class that has to read books. I could see it building immersion, but it sounds about as exciting as becoming a swordsman by spending years training on dummies and hay bales.
You may want to check out Eternal-Lands which has exactly this system: in order to do any kind of advanced skill, you need to learn it from a book. Books are expensive and you read them passively while you do other things. But if you want to mine ore, blow glass, fight pumas, or cast magic spells, you need to learn to do it from a book first.
I did not personally play this one, but sounds like it could be Eternal Lands. Note that as I didn't personally play it, I can't confirm it matches all of the details you mentioned.