I've read at least one post mortem that contradicts your take on this.
Yes. Written by Matt Firor.
Also, crazy that Zenimax gave such a massive project to a customer service rep! Wowza, no wonder you're bitter!
He isn't in charge of the project. He is in charge of being president of a company. You realize the difference correct? If I wanted to go back to his design ideas before in DAOC, I would first need to look at who was responsible for what. I do know that the game almost didn't ship, and Firor wasn't the one that pulled it out of the fire. Denton was. I also know that once he started an executive position, DAOC took a major shit. I also see patterns repeating themselves. I would like to have an example of any game that has been in development for 5+ years trying to get Aggro implemented fully and have the staple of it's end game (RvR) not even being close to implemented in the game as stated by Tesotester. But I would also love for you to tell me how any president of a creative company responsible for launching a popular IP MMORPG says the following:
"At this point in the evolution of MMOs, every MMO has tried something at one point or another that you're going to do in your game. There aren't any more truly innovative features."
At the same time, CCP just merged an Online FPS portion of their game on a completely different platform to work in tandem with their space based MMORPG on the PC and having the two seamlessly interact in real time.
Which also led to the comment everyone else in the industry was thinking when they read Firor state it.
"Touborg said that he didn't agree with the statement, "and if I ever said that, Jon should fire me."
In the end, Matt Firor is terrible for the advancement of the genre, terrible in this space as a result, and should do something else if he thinks all these games will be are feature copies of which he will never drive towards too.