I didn't join before 2004, I had never heard of it. I was running NR2003 offline. I had never even been in an online race. Was trying to be interested in Racer (before 050final I think) and searched BHM the beginning of 2005 for some kind of normal, non-race car sim. Downloaded it and thought, eh, it's pretty cool (S1 demo). Tried my first online experience and figured the novelty would wear off. It was beginning to until they released S2 alpha demo. The rest is history. I still stink, but I think there's only been a total of 8 days disregarding a couple of 2 week stints in the flight sim, that I haven't raced online with S2. Bought the license the second week S2 Alfa full was released.
From what I have seen, everyone else can ohhhwww and aaahhhhh over the graphics of other games, but LFS is the king of both the physics and the graphics. I still do like NR2003, but they are 2 different racing platforms and can't compare with each other. Everything else I've seen is just crap.
I couldn't believe that LFS was 2 or 3 yrs old when I found it.