Was just about to post a similar thread. Indeed, from all the announcements not mentioning any more story as part of the planned "aggressive content updates", it worries me that they're going to shift to really just a more cookie cutter model of "more raids and bgs" as it were. Really, I feel like them ignoring one of the biggest parts of what the game was built on and opting to focus development for more, I don't know, "mainstream mmo" concerns definitely contributed to the decline in interest.
That being said I recognize that with the voice work and all, developing story takes a lot of effort, however since Bioware originally based the game on a subscription model, it would have been cool to see "episodic" story updates every 1-2 months; and actually if they'd think about it, and perhaps they did, selling class/companion quests to F2P members might be a good idea if the stories remain up to standard. Perhaps let the planet quests be free and would advance the general Pub vs Imp planet by planet storyline, but F2P would need to buy class quests if they want to see the new class content. Too bad the team was downsized.
Also the layoffs leave me wondering: how many of the folks they fired were crucial to the development of the various class, companion, etc. story lines, and would their continuation be up to par? Really it's a shame (if the smaller team is to blame and from what I've been reading) that the current team is pretty much forced to focus on restructuring to F2P and other matters instead of content development.