I can't see how you can say you are being punished. The entire game is built in way that you don't have to create alts, unless you wanted to play on a different data centre or with a different character look. Granted, i think housing should be shared across all of your characters on the data centre.

The thing is, even for story replay-ability they have created New Game Plus so more and more there is less incentive for us to create and play alts. Which to me can only be a good thing.