This is the problem... the genre made into the mainstream part of the gaming industry and now it is all the big guys maintaining their mediocrity while the old school devs start flaking off and making their own, smaller companies thus spreading the talent pool thin and never getting anything off the ground. (...or it takes forever).
If anything ever comes out of the MMO rubble, I think it will be purely accident that someone hits a homerun but I'm not sure there will be a playerbase left to sell a game to when that happens. I think Blizzard and at one time SOE had a chance to do something really cool, and Blizzard still might but the MMO industry is a mess at this point.