In addition, this is a Role-Playing Game. It's all about having a character that may be little to nothing like your real-life self. Personally, when I play an MMO, I like to create toons from all species, from both genders, from both factions, etc. Normally I'll grow more attached to one or two of the characters, but I love and seek out the variety. When the same sex option is opened up, I will have at least one character exploring each of the combinations m/f, f/m, f/f, m/m. I would bet there'll be many who do something similar. Since no other players see your romance choices, I would even bet that some of those saying they're opposed will be secretly romancing a same-sex companion. (Do space ships have closets?) The whole point of RP is exploring other ways of living and being.

I'm with you there. For the first 5 planets I went through, I tried really hard to complete all the codex entries for each planet. By the time I got to the 6th planet, I was getting really discouraged about the whole codex thing and realizing how broken the codex was, so broken that not a single planet could be completed. Each time I logged on I was excited about getting new codex entries. The excitement has worn off. It may seem like an exaggeration to some, but if it turns out that the many of codex entries are either intended to be unobtainable or that bioware is just not going to bother fixing them, I will probably end my subscription. Finding them all was a really big part of my initial excitement about the game.

So far I haven't found this game very grindy at all. Of course, I'm coming from LotRO, which has always been somewhat grindy, and has become more and more so over the last couple years. I appreciate the bonus quests: they're optional, give good xp, and have you killing things you normally have to kill in the normal course of your questing or making through a mob area to get to a quest location. Often you have to do a little extra work to finish tier II or tier III of the bonus quest, but honestly it's really not that much. On the classes I've played so far (Sage, Gunslinger, Vanguard, Sorcerer), I've had no problem dps'ing mobs down quickly, so it's not much extra time finishing out bonus quests. I've really been enjoying the non-class quests on each planet so far; they really get you involved in the history and flavor of each. The voice acting is just icing on the cake. Maybe I'll eventually hit a grindy planet, or perhaps end-game will be, but so far it hasn't seemed that way to me at all.

There's also space missions for extra xp.

This. I've done Beta testing for this game and others, and after live release, it's so painful to see comments about why wasn't this caught in Beta or didn't the Beta players let anyone know that this idea would not be received well when I know full well there were pages and pages of discussion about it in the Beta. I've just decided that either some things are too small (no pun intended) to deal with before launch and will be fixed later so the Devs can work on literally game-breaking bugs, or something is exactly like the Devs want it to be even though they now know it will annoy players when it goes Live. The codex (I hope) falls into the former category and was released with lots of known bugs which are slated to be fixed later. I will be one of the very annoyed players if I find out the codex is actually WAI and it's not meant to be completable by any player. As far as I know there's not even a planet whose entire codex is completable at this time.

On each planet I've been to so far (Ord Mantel, Tython, Coruscant, Taris, Nar Shaddaa and Korriban) there have been at least 2-3 codex entries that were bugged or incompletable. I'm just curious if anyone has completed all the codex entries for a given planet yet or are they all bugged in some way? I'm having fun chasing down all the codex entries, but it's frustrating not being able to complete a single planet. Is it Bioware's intent that we be able to complete the codex on each toon/class? I assume so since the entries are different for each class.

There's already a toggle in the preferences that lets you see whether a choice has a light or dark affect. With it toggled on, when you mouse over your choices you see either the white star or the dark triangle.