Welcome back
I will most likely never go back to New Frontier, apart from just checking in every once in a while when a new patch is released. It's for sure possible to get the
necessities from the cash shop without paying any real money, but it will take you years and A LOT of time, at least if you don't have any of the necessities already. The conversion rate for gold to BC is too high, which makes it quite unrealistically unachievable at this point.
The subscription server has way too low population to be playable in my opnion, at least if you want the real MMO experience. They have a small community that apparently are very determined to keep the server alive, so if you're just looking to get some friends to do some content with every once in a while then I suggest this server.
The new server, like AOP said, doesn't have an exchange NPC (yet) it seems. So yeh, this one is truly pay 2 win at the moment as you have no chance at all to get the cash shop items as a non-paying player. I thought they would make this server less pay 2 win since that's the only thing probably that could bring this game back to life, even if it would just increase the population by a little, because I know for sure that some old players and veterans would start playing there if that was the case.
Conclusion (TLDR):
If you have a char on the New Frontier server that you already own some of the necessary cash shop items on, I suggest you continue playing on that character.
If you don't however have several of the necessities, and you don't care about a very low population, I suggest subscription server.
If you don't care about pay 2 win, or you just want to get some free items to start with and maybe hope that things will turn out good in the end, I suggest the new server.
If none of the above seems good enough for you, I suggest you stay away from this game. Find something that has more of what you want in an MMO.