The heavy convo stuff is saved for class quests and heroics. If anything, I'm fairly happy with stuff like Hammer, because Esseles in particular can become a slog in terms of dialogue. I suspect they realized that if every instance was THAT dialogue-heavy, people would go nuts.

Hammer, at least, is nowhere near "too hard". If anything I was wildly disappointed in it after some of my guildmates hyped up how hard it is. Now, the Locust heroic on Taris? That was surprisingly difficult. No wipes, a couple deaths though. CC makes it easier but the pulls are harder than Hammer, which seems a bit odd. The loot is absolutely insane, though, which makes up for it I guess. I'm eager to get into Athiss and see just how good/bad it is myself.

They also, in all likelihood, create a backup of the data image of the server. This is a crucial bit of MMO maintenence that is often a bit hard/annoying to do when servers are live and running. Imagine this: someone spills coffee on the server and it takes out all the hard drives. All of them. Somehow. It's like a keg of coffee or something. Either way, normally you've lost all the player data and everyone would have to start over from zero. If you have a backup, though, you can simply load that onto your replacement hard drives and keep going. Rollbacks in such a situation can suck, but it sure beats the alternative.

You no longer need a table at all to modify your items. I wouldn't be too surprised if the remaining tables weren't deprecated out of the game before year's end.

Heroic quests are just quests and areas in the open world that are designed for more than one person. You CAN enter them alone but you are probably going to get steamrolled. TOR currently lacks a "dungeon queue"; you must travel to the entrance of a flashpoint or operation to begin it, and find a group on your server the old-fashioned way. (Personally I hope this never changes but that's neither here nor there.) Operations are level 50 only, but there are a few "world bosses" out there for raids of under-50s.