I'd actually like to see far more abilities made passive, however you are limited in that number of passive abilities you can have so that's where your ability to plan builds comes into play. Riposte, backstab, Ignite (fire spells leave a dot), Combat Builder A01. Basically any ability that you would -always- smash when available should not have to be smashed at all. Any ability you use should always be a choice, and you should rarely want to use the same ability over and over.
A simple example would be a wow rogue that doesn't have to use sinister strike/mutilate, only finishers. This essentially gives you four combat abilities with a shared cooldown of around 3-5 seconds. So you choose to either hit slice and dice (self dps buff), riposte (large damage dot), eviscerate (smaller damage dd), or kidney shot (stun) So, a rotation, but without all the spam in between.
Or maybe I'm nuts and this would bore us all to death after being used to 60apm MMOs.