You guys still here?

For my part, I'll definitely be maintaining both. They are different enough that they are each interesting in their own way, so depending upon my mood...

My own reactions, riffing off Cherry's list:
HAVING to go through training each time: definite fail, but a typical MMO design oversight/flaw/failure. I'd bet that requirement will go away in a year or so, if not sooner.

Pace of the game until you get travel power: not sure I agree on this one. I am usually able to get my travel power in CO by the time of my first trip to the Power Center. You get it at level 5, after all. By comparison, CoH is the sluggard on this (yes, I'm thinking of _you_, Positron...)

The over the top cartoony/comic-booky nature : Once I turned off the "heavy comic-book outlining" in options, it wasn't nearly as annoying any more for me.

Powersets: missing more than a few things I really want, but there is some good stuff in there, too. I got my spell casting and dual pistols, but lost plants, gravity control, radiation projection, ninja summoning...

Acrobatics travel power: big tub full of WIN for sheer coolness, as far as I'm concerned. I'll be shocked if we don't see some of those animations in CoH in the (hopefully near) future. I spent a full half-hour just back flipping around the desert when I first got that one.

Auto-follow (and melee in general): frustrating, but I'm starting to get the hang of it. I just wish, for the sake of Pete, they'd stop having _jumping_ turn off auto-follow. (But auto-follow on a moving NPC while using superspeed is freaking hilarious if you're willing to just sit back and watch.)

Inventory: Meh. I don't mind dealing with "stuff", but the prototypical inventory management sub-game frustrates the &$%! out of me. The crafting is marginally interesting, but out of the gate, I'm not seeing much reason to use it. Random drops are as good or better.

NPCs: I'd agree, some good stuff in there. Some of the movie references/in-jokes are cool, too, which reminds me: I've got to bust out the old Big Trouble in Little China DVD and watch that one again...

All that said, I've been with CoH since release, and I'm not leaving any time soon.

On the Lifetime subscriptions:

I think there is a portion of the calculation is somewhat non-economic. A lifetime subscriber is going to drift in and out of the game: after all, there's never any economic reason to "unsubscribe". They form a (potential) strata of players who will keep the world inhabited for other regularly paying/potential new players.

Also, the time frame the company is concerned with isn't the lifespan of the game, it's the lifespan of the average subscription/account. $200 at the $15/mo is 15-16 months, not including PV/FV considerations or collection costs. The over/under calculation for the company is based on account lifespan, not game/service lifespan. (Player perspective is different, of course.)

Also, remember that there was a limited number of lifetime subscriptions offered (to the point that it created hard feelings amongst some players who were told they couldn't get one, despite the original offer's time frame not having expired). Not sure how that was resolved, but it's not like it was an open-ended, get-it-any-time-you-want-it deal.

Still here. Not often, but still here.