At this point all this is mute. Until they say that they are going to put something like this into production were wasting our time.
That being said, it is possible to have a great story and a sand box in the same combination. I for one would love to see more open world expansion in the ways of player housing and city formations like was done in SWG. Also A SWG type of space interaction would be incredible. People have said they don't want to have the same SWG grind and kill.....were forgetting that this is Bioware...if they can't make free roam space story driven no one can. Granted this would be a monumental undertaking, but it would ad years to the game play. I stayed with SWG after the NGE purely for the space and it was still using a sub par gaming engine. I loved the crafting and reverse engineering that was done in SWG, for space and if similar things were added into this game I would never play another game.