It isn't the scale of the areas that bother me, it's the ambience.
With Wow, you always got a feeling from each area. When I see the name of a Wow zone I can immediately remember what the zone looked, sounded, and most importantly, felt like.
Tor's zones have no real ambience. The music is blah, the npc's look like clones of each other, there's no sense of urgency from the surroundings. Everything feels so sterile. When I think about some of the games I've played, I get a nostalgic feeling for some of the zones. I can't ever imagine myself missing a place like nar Shadaa and wanting to go back to it. It's choppy. It's plastic. It's mostly flying over areas that you can never reach.... ***.
Even tatooine was a let down for me. I don't like it when it's obvious that the geography has been designed to contain certain areas. Some games do this better than others. Tatooine felt like a kind of a honey comb or something.
It's obvious Bioware went from designing a rpg to a mmo.