You can modify an engine... For a game this large I am sure they can bend it to do whatever they so wish.

The thing with WoW was, when I first started playing it there was no battlegrounds, no structured high level content... not even remotely enough to keep the addicts busy these days (content cleared on test servers before it has even been released), yet people were just happy to play the damned game. It's the same situation with other game genres. FPS games for example, once upon a time people were happy to just frag each other and win rounds, and the only tracking ability you had was to take a screen shot and post it on a forum. Then along game achievements / unlocks / detailed stat tracking, and all of a sudden people can't live without it. People that have just switched over from WoW are just burnt out... if you look at it like this, most casual players will not complete the content before the next patch comes out, and in terms of pvp... a lot of online games get away with much less content than WoW / SWTOR. It is asking too much of a developer to make an infinite amount of content each patch - so in order to keep people subbed it has to be a good RPG - so people get really attached to their character and the community so no matter what they are doing in the game they are happy to keep paying to do it.

Just because the Sage has a saber doesn't mean they should use it. Whilst lore wise all jedi's should be adept in fighting with a saber - that would be hard to balance in the game and the philosophy behind a consular is they avoid fighting when they can opting for protection using the force and healing others. I'd be pretty angry is the sage didn't have a lightsaber - what jedi doesn't have a lightsaber...