i would have laughed and just ignored you but you answered in a decent manner so sure ill explain.
in woe stun doesn't happen to anyone but randoms (ergo theyre irrelevant), so hammerfall is gone, and everyone has perma fcp so meltdown is gone. that leaves them with ram. it's a good skill against mvps and mobs i suppose.
that means a whitesmith can only ram people, but the dps is irrelevant against every class aside from dd hwiz, on anyone else you'll just be run away from and ignored. no one cares about the zeny costs, the fact that it's simply zeny makes it the cheapest class, especially compared to other classes where you need bombs, gems, bpots, etc. even the fact they're so shut down by dispell isn't even as relevant as their other flaws. it's a combination of all those failures that makes it so they don't fulfill any niche available in pre-re woe.
the only melee class who can succeed in an environment full of huge aoe dmg and long range buttsmashing of demo/dispel is champion.. and that's because they're a solid support class who can buff, pneuma, and move quickly through the map with snap. furthermore theyre self-sufficient, since they can immediately murder or escape anyone who comes by them. even if they get dispelled they can *still* snap away quickly.
a lone smith can get bombed to death, get stuck in hitlock in spells, get dispelled and webbed.. or not kill whoever they come across.
none of this is theory crafting. there's a reason no guild has run a whitesmith in almost a decade. the only exceptions would be on servers that arent made for serious woe, who require things like materials having insane costs/weights, in which case theyre useful as couriers and that's it. even still they're outclassed by champions in those environments. i suppose the advantage is theyre a lot simpler to play than champion... that's about all they have going for them.
edit2: oh yeah it's funny you've mentioned how ro is mainly older players, but if you've been on any forums, you know how epic trole xddd D memer they can be.. it's kinda sad how childish the community tends to be :C