The game was a great game...it was SOE that sucked. Not sure if they still are, but SOE had the worst customer service when it came to suggestions from the platerbase.
Basically, yhe people that didn't like pre-cu were lazy. People complained so then SOE decided to dumb the game down, by making it soloable to keep up with WoW, and destroyed it.
it had it's problems, but every MMO does. There will never be a perfect MMO.