#3, I agree. I say this as a lichess mod who sometimes represents the site, but what follows is my personal opinion.
I honestly think that most sites do about the same job when it come to community. It's only on the two extremes that there are differences.
Namely, we don't have the rock-bottom of chess players. Part of this is due to SEO, but more due to design. This is a no-nonsense chess site -- you are immediately shown a list of games you can join (without a join button or anything -- but an online gamer for instance would immediately understand the UI), and the registration screen requires you to do a mate in one puzzle -- so you must know the rules.
Chess.com by comparison (as an example) is open to all. There have never been more than 300 players below a rating 800 -- it was around 200 two years ago. I reckon ICC suffers quite a bit when it comes to the low end, but again, there is a healthy supply of 1500s at the very least. But there are probably less blow that as a proportion compared to other services.
We also don't have many players at top level. There's a few GMs and IMs, but there are no 'super GMs' -- yet.
We are going to get more GMs with time, though, for sure, whereas attracting wood pushers requires fundamental design changes. One of which was pushed just last night:
github.com/ornicar/lila/issues/885The two extremes aside, I think EVERY notable chess service -- chesscom, ICC, ChessCube, playchess, chess24 (though that's more about watching than playing)... they all provide a good range in my opinion.