Add it to the list of unnecessary changes done arbitrarily because the dice table said so or something. While I agree with the OP, in contrast to the other visual changes (new UI, new "origin story" symbols) the style icons are the smallest offenders.

With your post history I must admit to being on the fence on you being sarcastic 90% of the time. Sometimes it sounds almost sincere, but then stuff like this comes along that I find difficult to read in any other tone than mockingly disdainful.

The latter would imply they get funding for new people. That'd be neat. Replacing people after this mess also sounds good. But it's also possible they just included SWTOR because technically it's not a dead game that they develop, so it needs to be there or people ask questions. I hope there'll be hope, but more I can't wring out of it.

Expected =/= delivered. And with what 7.0 brought I'd in no way give benefit of the doubt or use anything other than the worst estimate.

A situation like this should be an immediate red flag to anyone in the development team even tangentially interested in inter-class balancing. Should. *Should*. SHOULD!

Then the Empire is even more doomed, as both sides have no more NPC medics but Republic is hogging all the actual player healers.

Educated guess: 7.0.1 with the most pressing fixes early-ish in April. Nothing afterwards in the three-month period.

Count me in. Although I would as a consequence of that also take that only the class companions (plus HK and Treek) are available. The bloat wasn't needed. Granted, it can be fun having a story NPC along, but this only serves to highlight the fact that the vast majority of class companions were completely sidelined and forgotten about, and this being the only reason why having someone actually relevant around might be neat. The only ones I might make an exception for are Theron and Lana, considering SoR did set them up quite well and they were the reason I did enjoy the new companion system (who even needs all them gits hanging about?).

True. But at the same kind most classes, sorry, "styles", became distinctly less fun than they were before, courtesy of cutting away abilities with all the surgical precision of your average horror-movie axe murderer and abysmal ability progress while levelling. So not even the requested good thing came out as fully positive. Plus I can only assume this feature is to blame why the devs thought they had to change the UI to accomodate it, because simply tacking it onto the old one and not reinvent the wheel (but in quadrangle-shape, this time!) was an idea straight from Mars, apparently.

From a meta perspective, I get the problem about the faction conflict. Noone can win, otherwise the game's premise would be gone. It was handled very well in the planet- and class-stories, though. This writing talent is now lacking, seeing as instead of all stories happening in the same universe every character now inhabits their own timeline, which is way lazier than creating a setup that can be worked with either way and still makes sense afterwards. The point about KotFE confused me as well, but that is personal taste, I guess. While I liked the cutscene quality and such of that part of the game, I disliked the chapter-structure (insofar as it actively discouraged playing with others) and the storyline itself (for me it fits as well to the rest of the game as the cube into the round hole), especially when it came to "oops, you'z in da future now and your crew is gone". [Cue wet fart noise].

Will say I find it curious how he brushes aside issues with the UI (doesn't even mention the eye problems some have) and the ability pruning (well, "gutted" may be a bit strong indeed, but an arrow to the knee it was for sure) and doesn't mention the insane amount of bugs at all. Or anything beyond story content, for that matter. While obviously even good articles will always have some degree of subjectivity, this one smacked of "I can not see it, hence it does not exist".

It's a start to fixing this thing. It'll be a long road still to go. Had exactly this (with some acknowledging of other issues) been posted 2 days after the patch hit, that might actually have been effective damage control. Now I will wait and see what happens here on the forum. Won't log in until the UI is tuned so I can safely lay my eyes on it, that's for certain.

If there is one constant in humanity, it's that generally lessons learned tend to stick only for a while. And with everything being connected and scientific progress being much faster these days, this span seems to shorten. Everything appears to happen faster, it appears like more is happening. May as well repeat a mistake someone else made, right, what's the worst that could happen?

Probably quite a bit of that came from realizing their mistake, owning it, and fixing it. Had they stood up and said "a loud minority is merely failing to see (or rather taste) our genius", that'd have been setting themselves on fire. Wonder if other companies are doing just that ... oh, wait.

To deprive them of even that I do no longer do my logins, even. Used to do them every day, whether I played or not. Both to get stuff and show a little bit of support even if I had no time to play or wanted to do other things.