If you are interested in role playing only, then a lot of this crap doesn't really matter. You just need to be able to get on and RP with people with as little interference as possible. Role players make their own world and their own story, the rest is just icing on the cake at best. If you make sure not to entangle yourselves with gms, then you are likely to have a good experience. The moment you let them get involved, your game/story is in jeopardy. This is why I say shy away from guild houses, gm tricks and props that you cannot set up yourself.
If you care about the gaming aspect and the actual game economy, then there are a few huge things that need to be addressed:
1. The economy is still unbalanced. I would seriously consider getting someone who has majored in economics to tackle this. I think the costs and benefits are still a little out of whack. If you play WoW ( and I mention this because they have this nailed down very well ) you see that the cost of a weapon at any level is proportionate.
You don't need to farm shit for a week to be able to afford a high quality weapon, rather you can simply use stuff looted from level appropriate creatures. Also, stuff that is over powered is not usable, so intermediate stuff retains it's value. I hate to say it, but when a noob can wield q300 weapons, the value of all other intermediate weapons plummet.
If there was some restriction to what quality of weapon a character could use, then the low and intermediates would be worth more and crafters who have not maxed their skill could make something off lower quality items. Similarly, the amount of work needed to make an item needs to be proportional to it's cost or value.
2. Quests are a pain to do and npcs are hard to find. This is by design I suppose, but it's more frustrating than rewarding. One of the nice things about WoW is that you can level your character fairly quickly by just doing the quests and killing the mobs that the quests suggest. Rather than farming one character all day and leveling every fifty or so kills, you get a small amount of experience for the kills, and a larger amount of experience for completion of the quest. Best of all, the mobs that the quest recommends are appropriate for the character at that point of development. The mini-map and dots of the heads of NPCs reduce a lot of the frustration with questing.
3. Actual gaming content is needed - dungeons, raids, and huge ass beasts that require collaboration to take down.
4. When things get old and played out, people are going to get bored move on. Can't do much about this.
