Star Wars as very story based as well. So "not all other mmo's let you skip the story" as far as I recall during "Rise of the Hutt Cartel" if you didn't finish the main story or your class quest story line, you weren't able to get into the new planet to get the new story for the new raid/trail thingy. If you were Sith, and you didn't do the opening quest to the planet, you didn't get to do anything.

Also, the reason that WoW probably let you do whatever you wanted is because you only could do 1 job per toon, therefor you'd have to do the story like 6 times, here you have to do it ONCE ... Yeah, could make an alt, but you can do everything on 1 toon, so doing the MSQ once and only once doesn't seem like a grave injustice.

Now, I think they shouldn't have gated the new jobs (Seeing as how the ASTRO job trainer is in Qarrymill FFS), but that is how they did it, people have been trying to get them to change it since they announced it, sadly, it probably won't happen for a long time.