You had me right up to THE VISION. I swear, that needs to become a thing.
Yes, I think I agree with you in full, my main issue with the whole thing is that it has a very distinct flavour of the Simcity and Diablo 3 messes around them, and I avoided them both because of the whole "Must be online to play single-player modes" thing, knowing full well that launch day -never- goes as smooth as anticipated. If the 16th goes smoothly, well, it'll be a small miracle, my overriding fear is that come the day of the launch proper we all end up stuck staring at a login screen. What then? An army of forum apologists saying "It's launch day, everything will be fine" ?
That's my big worry, it puts the MMO spin into things, with all the risks and issues and downtimes an MMO entails, but without the upsides an MMO brings.