This is cross platform, please don't forget this in your criticism.

The other MMO's you reference are PC only, thus, not gated by the rather poor memory limitations of our old friend, the PS3.

The UI developer has said a number of times, the restrictions faced when designing the UI, due to the support of the PS3 platform.

Yoshi, on the release of 2.0, said PS3 would stay alive through 3.0, as a sort of promise to concerned players. I imagine, on next expac, PS3 support is going to be dropped or discontinued for the expac content.