Obviously you didnt hate it enough if you completed it. I only got a couple characters to level 8, and that was miserable.
I like the game world, graphics and art design are more than acceptable. Interface wasnt too bad because you can customize every single aspect of it (something that needs to be standard in most games) and theres a cool selection of special powers, though I agree only being allowed to equip a handful at a time sucks ass.
My beef was finding people to help me run around and explore new areas. You can never run fast enough to get past tough monsters and find new lands. And eventually enemy kills only give you 1 or 2 XP so you cant wander and level up to get stronger. You have to do the quests which are not always convenient with a group of real people. And the hirelings are decent but use poor AI.
I also like how the game itself was designed. Instead of a million dinky little files scattered all over the place, they had two files. One was the executable, the other was a huge single data file. And theres no registry entries cuz when I copied the folder over to another hard drive and reinstalled Windows, the game loaded up fine without any issues.
MORE games need to be designed exactly like this. It may seem stupid, but it fixes so many issues, trust me. I've been gaming since the DOS 4.0 days, and things have not improved much from an efficiency standpoint.
But I dont play much these days. Its still a long ass grind, which is totally stupid because they arent making money when you stay on for months at a time. Its free to play. Theres no reason to stretch things out with stupid fetch quests.