Hehe great read, excellent post!
I quit playing CoH just before Issue 2 came out (at that point most of the "quality of life" features that make this game so fun hadn't been impemented yet). Missions later in the game offered less reward than a single boss mob kill gave, the difficulty slider wasn't in, and the archetypes were totally unbalanced. I powered my Fire/Ice Burn Tanker to level 36 in about 2 weeks (the cap was 40), and quit in disgust.
After 11 months of WoW, which is the EPITOME of what you describe above, I came back to the much improved CoH and am having an utter blast.
To tell you the truth, I think I'm about done with "traditional" MMORPGS... WoW is pretty much the most polished, easiest and funnest of them all... and, frankly, I think it sucks. I started a guild, levelled 2 characters to 60, geared the heck out of them, and started grinding on end-game content... which ended up being, for me, about 1000 hours total of nodding off at the keyboard while me and 39 other people did the same thing in the same orange cave over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. Once a week or so one or two of us got an "epic item"... which usually raised someone's "to hit" chance by 1% or added 14 to their spell damage or something barely noticeable like that.
Traditional end game content boils down to two things in one thinly disguised package: obvious time sinks and a lottery. You do something that takes hundreds of hours, resulting in a 1 or 2% chance of getting a reward. At this point, I feel stupid for playing the game in the first place, though my first tour through the endgame raids was pretty fun.
Sorry for the rant and the rambling, but your guide here really struck a chord with me - and I agree completely: in CoH the journey IS the reward!
