WTF is wrong with Age of Conan players?

Disclaimer: I work professionally in the video game industry, and have for about 16 years now. So while there is nothing I can do about my jaded, cynical, critical eye when it comes to video games, I should still at least take the time to mention that my opinions posted here are mine and mine alone, and do not reflect the opinions of my employers, or anyone else really.

So, I recently installed Age of Conan to give it a try. Where to begin? Let's start with the install, which took over an hour, and consumed 22GB on my hard drive. At this point I am thinking, "For that kind of time and space investment this had better be the best game I've ever played." Yeah. Not so much. After finishing the install and downloading the ~800MB day one patch, I was greeted by a game that chose default rendering settings for my NVidia 7800 that did not render anything except my characters hair and eyeballs and the water (basically, only textures that had alpha). Not off to a great start. I checked the video options and it was set to shader model 2.x, which was odd because I'm pretty sure the 7800 supports 3.0. Changing to that, it at least rendered correctly, which is unfortunate, because the game looks.... horrendous. I can't believe this game is getting 9.0 and 9.5s on graphics. People must be confusing "high-polygon" with "high-quality", which are very very different things. It is in-fact usually much harder to make something high-poly, or 'realistic' look good (see: uncanny-valley). WoW got away with their low low poly count by choosing a cartoony style, which was probably the very best art-direction decision they could have made. In Age of Conan, everything looks weird, mismatched, and bland. Additionally, the framerate was terrible, about 11fps in the jungle, about 6 in the town. I guess I could upgrade to an 8800 or 9800, but I'm not going to, because even if the framerate was high enough, the game would still be atrociously ugly. The resource loading/management was also awful; oftentimes, it would take at least 30 seconds for some textures to even load, and more than 5 seconds once combat started to load the combat animations. That is 5 seconds of my character and the NPCs just sliding around. Unacceptable. When the combat animations finally did load, I laughed out loud at how bad the combat stance and jump animations were for my character. And that is not something that a better graphics card will fix. I can't believe anyone ever looked at either of those animations and said, "Yeah, that is shippable." It is amateur hour at best (Actually I have seen mods with much better animations). People must be desperate for anything new that is not WoW... I haven't even mentioned the rampant graveyard camping on PvP servers, but honestly it doesn't matter because the game is so ugly, and performs so poorly, that I am really just going to uninstall it immediately (hopefully that won't take another hour) and get my 22GB back.

Second Disclaimer: I am in no way implying that every game I have ever worked on and shipped is perfect, far from it. But I expect a basic level of performance and aesthetics to make a game playable, and Age of Conan falls way, way short of that. It's only redeeming feature is that it is 'online', if it were a single player game, I'm sure it would be getting 4 or 5 out of 10s.