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I'll eventually be a raid oriented player, too, but I have enough experience with MMO's to know that starting out as a raider at launch would lead to burnout within 6 months. Especially with a game like this where there's an enormous amount of content before 50. In that sense, it seemed sensible to approach the game from the standpoint of trying to experience as much of that content as possible in the first year, since it would be the most polished aspect of the game, and then gradually shift toward the grind side of things around the time the game hit the year mark. Because there are only 8 stories to play, and I don't anticipate them adding more in the future. So at some point the endgame will be all I have, too.
The problem with MMOs in a general sense is - I'm not sure how to verbalize this, maybe it's instant gratification, a lack of patience. When a game launches, people spend 40 hours a week online, treat it like a job (when I raid, I probably take it more seriously than any job I've ever had), rushing through to the end game as quickly as they can, and then complain when they're bored after doing the same thing every night for three months. It's rush rush rush, burn out, move to the next game, rush rush rush, burn out, move to the next next game. And it happens with every single MMO that comes out. The reality of it is that none of these games (including WoW) ever settle into what they really are until months and months after release. But by that point half or more of the playerbase has already left for the next greener pasture. The cycle never ends.
I actually tend to wait until 6 or more months after launch to start playing, because by that time the game's are usually pretty set. The games I play from launch I tend to quit fairly quickly (I think my first run in WoW lasted 8 or 9 months - I came back about 8 months after that for another 6 months). When I come into more mature games I tend to stay longer. By that time I usually find that there's an established, dedicated playerbase and most of the people I don't enjoy playing with (I call them "WoW kiddies" these days) are gone, and I'm hitting around the time that the first major expansion hits. I did that with Everquest (my first MMO) and played more than a year - actually quit that because I was spending all my waking hours online. I did that with LotRO and played for more than 3 years.
As far as the WoW kiddies go, I have to be honest, the players leaving SWTOR, at least on my server, have been a net gain in terms of the social aspect of the game world. I literally didn't have General Chat on at all after the first day in the game, because it was just wretched (even worse than it was in Beta). I keep it on all the time now. There's still the occasional douche in there, but generally it's all about the game now, and people tend to be friendly and helpful. So while people quitting concerns me in the sense of keeping the game going financially, it doesn't bother me at all in terms of the kind of people I can actually find to play with now. It's like the wheat's been separated from the chaff.
We'll see where the game goes from here. I would tend to agree that 1.2 is what launch should have been (and what launch was probably intended to be...), and I'm enjoying myself more now than I have at any time since my first beta. Meeting new people, actually grouping up to do event-related stuff. But you're right in that there has to be a point where they stop losing players.
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