I always thought the community hype was overrated. When some people talked about their ignore list, sounding like it was longer than their friends list, of course the community seemed great because those people overlooked the warts. I was never in the in-circle of groups, so I saw a lot of elitist snobbery going on. That doesn't mean the community was bad, especially compared to other MMOs, but then that bar was set very low. I would call the COX community good, not great.
That's your experience, and it's valid. I was talking about the community that surrounded the game; in-game, there were plenty of cliques to go around, and groups with different goals and ideas of "fun." But the game supported all of those, which I found/find fascinating.
The community surrounding the game is the one that organized charity drives, met up at cons, organized responses to the news of the shutdown, sent gifts to the devs, provided build advice, and spawned multiple "spiritual successors," mainly driven by volunteerism and a love of what we had.
So, yes. I had a lot of people on my "ignore" list, because their game play styles/values didn't match what I wanted to do or what I found fun, or because I thought they were obnoxious. The in-game community was just one aspect of the larger CoX community.