I'd be fine with something, simple, like just some checkboxes in the Alliance screen to pick who you want as your ship's crew, up to a max of 5 or so. You go to your ship, there they are, doing crew-y stuff, and making the place feel like an actual operating vessel, rather than the galaxy's loneliest, saddest Party Bus. Whenever I use my ship, I have this visual of my agent sitting alone in her huge conference room, poking at a bowl of cereal and reading a cookbook entitled "Romantic Meals for One."

Agreed. I got these awesome light blue crystals, and I only ever see them for Flurry and Speed Shot, which are a small percentage of my visual effects. Why not blue Charged Shots? An Aimed Shot with a blue glowing contrail? Why, Bioware, why?

This would be a nice feature, but restrictions would be required. Bioware could implement some kind of Bolster mode, rather like what they do for PVP, which would raise your stats and effective level high enough to get to your story areas and play through them. However, activating this mode would also disable all crew skills, trash mob XP gains, non-story quest XP, loot drops, valor gains, grouping, and so on. Your companions would also "go on vacation" when you went back to normal mode, and would be accessible again for questing and crew skills only when you reached the appropriate level via normal XP gain. The upshot is that you could see the storyline and get a feel for how the class plays, but once you're done with the story, you're still going to have to go and grind out all the other normal missions, just like everyone else, if you want to actually gain levels, gear, and skills. I could see Bioware doing something like this later on, once they raise the level cap, so as to encourage people to roll alts and get them all the way up to Level 50 so that they can then see the new lvl 50-60 storyline continuations. It would be PERFECT for the Legacy System.

Lando Calrissian?