So, why were the fleets chosen again?

i Fully agree with that, that would work like a charm because iam the first who will leave the fleet to spend the time in the Capital world.

If you download a memory chart app to your computer, the planets take, on average, 1+ GB, and the fleet only 400k, so the fleet loads MUCH faster.

In addition, there's no grass, there are no trees (the holo trees are much less "detailed" and "realistic" and thus consume less graphics power), and there are no unnecessary things such as critters roaming around, NPC vehicles flying all over the place, animated water, etc.

They could have just split the capital worlds up to have two separate instances. Would work exactly the same way it does right now (with one instance for the meeting place, and another for the capital world), except the surroundings and atmosphere would be better/more immersive.

1) The "main social hub" is whatever the community makes of it. The fleet is definitely slightly more convenient than either Coruscant or Dromund Kaas, most of the regularly used features found on the fleet are actually available on those two as well.
2) I'm certainly GLAD myself that the community decided to make the fleets the social hubs. Every tried jumping pipelines to get some datacron on a laggy server? Coruscant is already bad enough for that, but gladly it's still doable outside peak hours. If Coruscant turned into a main hub, it'd become nearly impossible to make some of those jumps, especially the track in The Works would be a major pain then, with half your jumps registering late or simply not registering at all.

???!!!!!

Is that true?!?!?

Probably less "like" and more "use", but yeah.

The only thing I do not like about the Fleet is the Lag that many of us can experience there. It is not just limited to those with lower end PC's as many with really good PC's have issues there as well. They just need to fix that. If they fixed it I would actually go there more often. Currently though I stay away from the Fleet like the plague. I am not sure I would even visit it much if I was back home with my DeskTop gaming PC.

I will say that I do like the Planets better than the Fleet, just do to the way they look. It is much more pleasing to hang out at than some small Space Station. I just wish that there was a reason to visit the older lower level planets. The only older planets I do go back to visit now with my Level 50 alt is Coruscant or Nar Shaddaa, and that is just to use the GTN. Other than that, I really do not see any other reason to visit them. I pretty much stay around Belsavis. The only reason I am on Voss is do to the fact that I am finishing my 3rd Chapter.

I really wish that Each Planet had content at All Levels instead of just being Separated by Levels. Maybe in the future they will add New Areas to all of the planets where higher level content could be so that we have a better reason to go back to them.

The game couldn't handle this so BW changed it / nice amount of beta players didn't like BW's implementation of it. It was a tad crazy tbh.

This would not change if the capital planets were the main hub. People would still be standing around the same places in circles. The only difference would be for players actually trying to do missions on those planets. It would be horrid because of all the chat spam as others have mentioned. And that isn't the only problem it would produce as you can guarantee the level 50 players would run around killing mission mobs etc. to 'have fun' with the lowbies.

Well, I wasn't around in beta so I'm just going to have to assume the beta testers had good reason for recommending BW put the entire population in grey, lifeless homogenous fleets.