I will apologize in advance for being all over the place with this reply because I am in a hurry.
But.
Why would someone say that SWG was a "crapfest" unless they played the last year of its existence?
NGE was a crap system. And SWTOR resembles the NGE more than any other game i've played (since i never played WoW). Prior to NGE it was a intuitive game... Far more intuitive than SWTOR. I like SWTOR for what it is... I play it like a single player game with a chat system... I play alone most of the time because I only have one real life friend that plays this game with me and for the longest time we were 10-20 levels apart so playing together was sort of out of the question.
So we would do our class quests and just send /tells or /whispers to each other spouting what we liked and what we didnt like as we played.
I like to think im a reasonable person. I do have fun playing this game, but as I said before... far from intuitive... I feel like im playing a hundred facebook games within one big star wars game... What I mean by that is, I feel like crafting is like a iphone app game or some farmsville hybrid where im constantly clicking create buttons and hoping something different happens randomly (crits or REing schematics at random).
Space combat is just Lego Star Wars with slightly better graphics. Creating ship parts is a joke. I miss the days when JTL (jump to lightspeed) first came out and i could spend countless days working on collecting premium components to RE into one super component... eventually making a ship that was incredibly ****** and set me apart from every other guy that just "casually" flew in space.... Why should I have the same lame ship as everyone else if I want to specialize in flying?.... Han solo had the fastest ship in the galaxy.... Its not like his engine was sold on the galactic market for 20,000 credits for anyone who wanted it.... Otherwise there would have been hundreds of millennium falcons.
Theres nothing to really set you aside from anyone else in the game...
Everyone in this game is "heroic". And for a "MMORPG" theres not much for "RP". When everyone has the same base story classes, then really everyone is just a clone of each other minus a few different "choices" they made... but we've all shot the same people... blew up the same factories... stopped the same bad guys.... blah blah blah...
I understand what the OP is trying to say... i dont think its a whine fest... just a let down on high expectations. I will still play the game with the hopes they will improve the things I don't like and continue to enjoy the things that i DO like.
As far as weapons go... I would have liked to be able to use rifles or heavy weapons if I wanted as a BH... I always halfway felt ripped off being forced to use a blaster pistol... What kind of bounty hunter doesnt switch up their loadout depending on the job?... I understand I have different gadgets... that part is nifty... But sometimes maybe using a rifle over a blaster pistol would be advisable... All the BH's in the SW universe had different styles... Not all of them were like Jango Fett.
So thats what my point is.... I just think there should be more options to set you apart from everyone else if this is to be a RPG... If not, its fine the way it is. It should have been KOTOR 3 instead of SWTOR based on how they designed the game.. thats my opinion.