So, what we’re seeing here, is some genuinely decent and/or fresh ideas, buried underneath a quagmire of cookie-cutter MMO paint-by-numbers gameplay and setup, with close to no actual refinement at all.

…sounds like your typical case of a dev team having “that one or two guys” who are all about going gung-ho on making something new and great, before being beaten back into line by all the other guys (and the company themselves) who just want the project to be done with and thrown onto market so it can start making money. “Those guys”, with their ideas and dreams and their starry-eyed-ness, who get up at the start of the day looking to make worlds, not understanding that the rest of their co-workers with they’d just shut the hell up and go with the status quo already.

You know, because why bother putting effort into something when you can just fart it out into open beta, make a few quick bucks off of the few people who’d feel whatever crazy need they have to sink all of their lunch money into the cash shop, then move on to the next thing.