CCP president points to the EVE community as their reason for success

I disagree that most MMO developers see their players as means. The dialogue that occurs between the developers of many high profile games - WoW, WAR, LOTRO, not to mention Cryptic Studios or SOE - demonstrates their respect for their customers over and above means to profits. CCP has developed a game that succeeds largely because of the emergent gameplay that the environment engenders and which is ultimately furnished by the players. Yet CCP also has game mechanics like their real time skill training on one character per account that motivate people to have multiple subscriptions. The relationship between player and developer/publisher is not that clear cut.

The developer end of those games may care, but the publisher end does not. CCP intentionally developed a niche player driven game and intentionally self-publish it as such.

SoE for example, always has the left hand doing something the right hand didn't know about(NGE, EQ exchange servers, rmt shop, etc). Blizzard continually dumbs down its content for the casual core(WoTLk raid content). Cryptic no longer has an active title, and picked up dev work on STO without consulting the fan base. Mythic shoved a half-finished crock out the door and constantly tries to appeal itself to the carebear crowd. LoTRO guts its lore and does what it can to attract players regardless of canon limitations(lorekeeper, runekeeper).

CCP is even giving in to player requests for a training queue. Their current niche fanbase is happy. They aren't trying or wanting to lure wow players.