[DarkCloud_PK]

Storm was nearly invulnerable from being fired up until the PWA recently were allowed to start making significant changes under Bell. Even then, it is hard to even convince to the PWA that he needs to go. You can see this by him surviving multiple reviews one after another a few months back. Despite his record and negative rating of him, he still retained his position.

In summary, no, noone could have simply replaced him years ago, as there was noone around that would fire him, I'm not even sure that there is a person that would today.

Is Storm to blame for Classic's state now?
Yes and no. Storm didn't directly cause the problems regarding content and direction, this was the constant development administration changes. Whenever an admin change happened, the server would normally be developed in a different direction that usually invovled needlessly redoing what has already been done and not using nearly done or even finished content of the previous administration.

Storm's fault lies in 3 areas.
1. Notoriously inactive.
2. Not a very good 'frontman', if you look at other server managers, they are very adept at PR, and constantly promoting the server and doing good PR with players. Storm doesn't do that, hell, neither manager really posts here unless they are threatened.
3.Simply not controlling administrators. I am pretty sure not one single admin has been fired/removed/demoted under Storm. Coming from experience, they are pretty much able to come and go as they please. Unless they did something extremely malicious, an administrator on Classic would have perfect 'job security'. Dev Admins were able to vastly alter and in ways, damage the server(think back to when Hell Raven was going to redo _everything_, we lost over a year of dev time under him, and we had more devs then aswell.). Storm should have been present in these situations, making sure a basic direction was followed and no needless revamps and reconstructions out of the sake of glory were made.