@Venekor: Boy are those gripes ever cherry-picked -- some of them are just flat out false.
- The UI is moddable if you don't like it. Try the Pre-NGE UI mod. It even comes with several dozen color sets and a zillion options to make it just like (or better than) the Old School interface. With a little effort you can set up the UI to look and feel exactly like classic SWG.
- All the new content is NOT recycled old art - that's simply not true. For examples, look at the chronicles system rewards, the craftables and lootables from the new themepark, not to mention all of the new stuff every holiday, and so on. No I'm not a big fan of wings and real world holidays either, but most players are, which is why most games have things equally silly.
- The TCG is optional. I don't like it either, but I can buy cards from fellow players with in-game money if there's an item I simply must have. If the card game is keeping SWG from shutting down, then so be it.
- Those in the SWG community know that most of the people still playing the game are pre-NGE die-hards and their opinions on Jedi tend towards "we'd rather not have them at all" not that Jedi was "too hard". NGE wasn't put in to appease people who wanted to be Jedi -- the path to Jedi in 2005 just prior to NGE was actually pretty simple. The NGE was put in because the LucasArts folks were morons.
- You do not have to grind instances or PvP for gear. The vast majority of gear in the game is still crafted by players, and slotted up with attachments made, again, by players. Weapons were similarly overhauled.
- The zombies content ties into a zombie-centered Star Wars book that came out a few months ago. It wasn't some random thing thrown into the game.
- While buffs do play a large role in the game, it's (obviously) gross exaggeration to say that all you do is stand there and spam one skill and heal. Combat isn't as smooth as say, WoW, but it's in line with the MMOs of its day.

There's a lot of hate toward SWG still out there -- obviously -- and you know what? A lot of it was deserved -- four years ago when the NGE went live. The game has come a long way since then. SWG has really been turned around and dragged up out of the NGE gutter over the last few years. Most of the crafting skills (including the long neglected droid engineers) have been overhauled. Old rangery skills have been reintroduced (beast mastery, milking, camps, etc). Most of the combat classes actually work now, contrary to classic SWG. Space is almost unrivaled. You won't find a better player city system, and very few equals to the housing system. Massively itself just had a nice feature on the millions of quests players had crafted in the new Chronicles system, which is a combination of SWG's original Storyteller system (unique to MMOs) and CoH's architect system. They are doing some really interesting things, and they're still one of only two truly persistent world MMOs out there -- but if you're still hung up on the past, you're going to miss out.