I hate AA with a fiery passion. I consider it two huge steps backwards in regards to building a robust combat system.

The problem was never the button mashing that people kept complaining about. The problem was the game's best DPS was achieved by spamming the basic attack for a class as fast as you possibly could. What I mean by that is button mashing was a symptom, not the actual problem itself. With the combo system we have now, a bit of tweaking would be all that is needed in order to make it a dynamic system that eclipses our current combat system in every way.

Unfortunately, the safe way for SE going forward is to stick to 'safe' conventions, and unfortunately AA is one of those. They're far, far too gunshy at this point to attempt anything truly innovative, so I'm not expecting us to ever see anything beyond the copy pasta'd combat that you find in most other MMORPGs.