As to getting a pve character to pvp in wow temporarily I believe that the word temporarily is indeed a big difference from how the switching works in ED, which is not temporarily, but instead as long as the player wants; which is my critique.
Why, sure, it's temporary. Just like someone that plays in open going for a few hours to solo to recover after losing a ship is temporary
Next time I'm subscribed I need to test if I can do that with one of those "eternal trial" accounts, BTW; I believe I can. It would be a nice way to do it on demand and for free, since WoW specifically allows players to run multiple instances with different accounts from the same install.
If taking procedural generation to the next level would be the key, or even only factor, to a great single player experience, you would have to do it really well (or just do it in '84/'93). Right now the procedural generation is the 400 billions systems/stars. The rest is really not. I really really do hope that FD will in fact take procedural generation to higher and higher levels, incorporating it into all aspects of the game to make it truly dynamic,even if I can't get my multiplayer pirate/trader experience. Right now though, there's not much else to ED's procedural generation other than the 400 billion systems/stars (which I do enjoy and find is truly awesome! Once planetary landings come I will definitely and surely go explore the galaxy and land on mysterious planets, and set up mining hoppers. At least that's a hope I got for the future of ED).
What is not procedurally generated, as of now, is just the player activity and some celestial bodies that were seeded by hand; Frontier doesn't seem to have started seeding handcrafted events yet. So, it's not only the systems/stars/planets/etc, but also the missions, the NPCs, the variations on commodity prices (atop the changes caused by the players), and so on.
In fact, if you go somewhere out of the way where meeting other players is exceedingly rare — exploring, trading away from the main hubs, etc — you will be going through what is nearly 100% procedural content.
Now, procedural generation can also be employed to change things. All that influence the players have on the galaxy? It's possible to get a very similar result by using procedural generation. There are games out there that do this, such as Dwarf Fortress. The same method could have been used in a potential single player offline version of ED.
(Heck, I would hope they use similar techniques for the online version to fill out activity where player presence is thin. With a play area the size Frontier made, they aren't going to be able to evolve it by hand in a satisfactory way, and even player activity might not be enough to make the galaxy feel alive apart from the better traversed home systems.)