For me, there is no 'point'. It is like a romance, or labor of love... at some point it was "just something fun to do", and then it grew into the thing it is.
The Devs themselves, with their attention to us, was a big part. That one Halloween, and the big custom maze... So much fun that day! And we cared about the Devs and they us. It wasn't just some money maker thing for them, although that didn't hurt, yeah?
The community, of course, the willingness to (mostly) not be meanies or obstinate jerks... just people wanting to play or chat or both. Solo artists would still talk. Teams would have a blast. And everyone wins. Pinnacle's Monday Night Fights were some of the friendliest and most fun PvPs I ever did, as it wasn't about beatin' other people to a pulp... it was more about having fun talking about the builds, and seeing how you measured up, and such like that, and always friendly and GFs everywhere.
And that was in game... in the forums, it pretty much continued (with a little modding to keep it friendly and topically aligned. I'll admit, sometimes, I was thankful for the mods, and sometimes... but hey, it worked overall.) I wound up hanging around in the Tech forums a lot to help others to get their computers ship shape and cleaned up and ready to play CoH... and that was a hard job sometimes. There were plenty of us, but... sometimes there were overwhemlingly bad setups or configs or bloated/virused... HJT logs anyone?
Doing that became a little bit of an obsession for a while, but I really REALLY wanted to help people enjoy what I saw as the best damn game around.
And the creativity. I mean... you could make MISSIONS, which is phenominal! A game that lets you build, if you really wanted, a 15 mission arc over three sessions? AND custom enemies?! Not to mention the costume creativity that could be had, either one you made, or just roll a random look until you said "Oh... a little tweakin' but hey, that's damn good!". And bios. I was a big bio writer, almost every character, once they got to 10, had a bio for them. It was important, even the very last build I made, which was a couple of weeks from DOOMTIME had a bio. I wasn't an RPer, but it helped me to understand why I played that character the way I did, and build it the way I was building it.
I don't know exactly what point... if I had to say, it was somewhere during the time I was being a Tech board dude, probably 4-5 years in?... but I do know the why of it. Just... everything, after a while, and it's something that I really do miss. For all kinds of reasons. I can't wait for it to return, even if frozen in time, and I have to restart all my characters. It'll be FUN to do it, and I would be just... ecstatic.