Well, Ive got a juggernaut that has over 700 hours played on it... So...
Zoners are various members of the four houses that dislike government/rule. (So they're rather comparable to anarchists) Some worship Eris, the god of chaos. (TAZ). There are many loads of indi factions (like my ZF or Zoner Federation)
There's the CoZ and the Zoner Alliance or some crap that are "Ruling bodies" although they do not have very much real power.
People who have left House space for all sorts of reasons. 'Using wars for profit' is not one of those, on account of there being Zoners when there weren't wars and through years of peace. You could possibly just think of them as 'lawful freelancers', just outside of the Houses.
Well a lot of that is caused by people making things up and making accusations without proof but I'll not rant, the Zoners have interested me for a while and I am thinking of making a serious Zoner character but I'm not sure yet.
I think a lot of people see that we want peace with everyone and actively try and thwart that. Mainly for the reason that they want to make Zoners more 'interesting' 'mix' stuff up a bit. Really all us players who RP Zoners joined because we wanted to have a tamer experiance than the average player. If you want something a bit more exciting then Zoners can get rather aggressive with NFZ violators:).
When it comes to what you can do as a Zoner, its more a question of what you cant do.
The average choice is trader, which is getting less prevalent as time goes on.