Sage, I have a ton of respect for you but I have to wholeheartedly disagree with the "ability" part of this post.
We've seen the passion from the devs, you call it lip service which is fine but I don't think that's fair.
These guys are passionate about what they do. I wholeheartedly believe they could deliver a game much closer to what we desire if they weren't so handcuffed by having to develop so many other parts of the game.
I will never disagree with you and your criticism of the game, I do not however agree that this is the fault of the current developers.
It would be one thing if we had never seen this before but we've seen multiple dev teams come and go over the years with no huge year to year changes to what some of us want.
When we look at variables, there is one constant in that equation and it isn't the dev team.