[6.1.2 broke the game]

Can confirm this worked for me too, thanks for posting it!

Download took forever to finish; around 7-8 hours (I have 500mb internet) but game seems to be working again now.

I finally found a fix.

 

I had to follow this video:

is the video i used

 

when i opened up C:\Program Files (x86)\Electronic Arts\BioWare\Star Wars - The Old Republic there was a file named launcher. I had to right click and "open with" and select notepad in order to change the bitraider_disable line to true. This caused the game to redownload some stuff and took about 2 hours. Use this as a last resort.

[6.1.2 broke the game]

Same issue here, went through all the steps of the OP and stuck in the exactly same situation.