the most notable content that the MP community has been producing is cheap inter-clan drama and racist memes.
Seriously you said that? Warband MP was full of events whit a lot of peoples for years. This was the true reason why Warband was played for almost 8 years. Events on Native, NW and a plenty of mods that were absolutely enjoyables. Also the public servers were very funny and peoples played them for years too.
Is current MP bad? Yes.
But with the release of the game from EA the game (specially the MP) will be modded so much, probably the MP will be better and surely more played than now, not for vanilla (that actually sucks to many) but for the plenty of mods for it, and will back to be an important and popular feature of the game.
Inter-clan dramas are in every games multiplayer's based communities it is absolutely not an exclusive of M&B one, sadly. Racist memes are everywhere on internet and in games chats, if you think that M&B is full of racists jokes and memes you probably don't know the old chat of Wargame: Red Dragon.