Hi everybody,
first of all, this is not a flame post. I work in IT myself, and I can empathize a lot with what the programmers are currently going through.
The game's overall condition is horrible. Everytime one bug is patched, two new bugs pop out of nowhere (and by "bug" I mean as well "broken things" and "unexpected/broken game behavior"). This is mostly a sign of sloppy programming. I have programmed myself, and I have had situations like these myself, and I know that they are a nightmare to maintain (not nightmare as on "many epixxes and a fancy title").
The reason why I ran into that situation was a lack of time. Money-people come to programming-people and say "it has to be live tomorrow", and the programming-people say "that can't be done", and the money-people say "then make it be done", and the result is a program with many counter-dependencies, where things influence each other that should not do that.
For example, we have a standard group for lost island heroic. One week, we go through the whole island in 25 minutes. The next week, we wipe at the first miniboss and 1st boss enrages around 20%. We didn't change anything, on the 2nd try we even used stims and stuff (which we usually don't).
I don't want to complain and bash the programmers. Instead, I want to tell the money-people (most likely EA) that you are saving money in the wrong places. The time (and therefore money) you save by whipping your programmers to program faster is spent thrice in the aftermath where the same programmers have to chase bugs that would never have encountered in the first place if they had been allowed to do their job.
Every player knows the situation. Patch is from 9 to 15 (european time), is extended for 3 more hours, when you log in, your companion doesn't have a head. Wednesday evening there is a patch-patch for another 3 or 4 hours, and on Thursday the patch-patch is patched. In the projects where I have worked the general meaning of that is "the bug situation here is Starship Troopers, and we are being overrun".
Maybe, with a little support from the community, we can finally get what we are used from Bioware - good work, good craftmanship. SWTOR is a really good game, I enjoy it a lot, but the bug-population is far to high. Give your programming squads some heavy tanks as backup and stop taking their ammunition away to sell it for quarterly figures.
tl, dr: Stop whipping the programmers to work faster, or the bug situation will never get any better