Yeah the spectrum is huge, however disease progression is also hard to predict, so a person with some very heavy relapses at onset might be relapse free for years afterwards and vice versa.
Iirc though there are some studies that showed that progression is in general more benign than initially estimated in most cases.
It's not an achievement to keep people with MS alive. People with MS have an average life expectancy that is very close to that of healthy people (literature varies between a couple of months http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1069023/ and several years, with 7 being the highest that I've seen http://www.nationalmssociety.org/What-is-MS/MS-FAQ-s). It's the quality of life that sucks for MS patients.
Uninformed statements like these make you sound even more snake oily than you already sound.