It might just be the trooper story then, because I've played BH, JC, and Smuggler up to ranging between 10-18, and I love the stories! I'd say the smuggler was my favorite; when that guy does that thing at the beginning, I agreed with my smuggler "Yup, he's SO gonna die! I'm going to hunt him down, kill him, and enjoy every second of it." As for the BH, so far the class quests have been bounties which literally are just go and kill something; HOWEVER, they do NOT feel like "kill x and return to quest giver." They're a real character, not a faceless npc.

The highest I saw on my server was 24, and I just hit 18 this morning while still taking a decent break to play LoL with some friends yesterday.

I ran into that with a couple names I wanted that were taken on ALL of the PvE servers, and that was in the first 4 hours yesterday...