Inclusive, yes. Attractive to newcomers, no. The massive grind required to advance through GC will turn them all away.

Why would non-level 70 players even get that announcement? It's stupid, they can't have any impact on GC until level 70. Spamming them like this is just bad game design 101.

Yes it is down, strange that Bioware and EA don't even bother mentioning it on their Twitter. It means there's no in-game support available.

I just bumped into this same bug. Cannot interact with Engineer Ferron because I've already done his quest a long time ago when I was first on the planett, thus my Bonus Series on Taris is broken. He shows up on the minimap as a quest point but there is no marker above his head.