@John:
I didn't see anything in GW2's footage that I consider disturbing. Or, at least, nothing more disturbing than most action games I've played lately.

The main things that draw me to GW2:

- No loot rolls ever. Loot is handled on a per-character basis, and the game makes heavy use of tokens to reduce the number of wasted drops. Given the way I hate RNG in my gearing, this alone would push me into trying GW2.

- No disadvantage to playing in a group, even if the players don't assemble a party. Mobs can't be tagged; everyone who participates in the kill gets gold, loot, and XP as if he soloed the mob; there are no skills that are bound to just party members; and even resource nodes are individualized, allowing each player to get his own share. As a consequence, there is no way to steal a crafting node, and where other games would have a killsteal problem, in GW2 the pretense killstealer is just helping the other player get his rewards faster and safer.

- Respeccing on the fly + all classes able to do all roles = any 5 good players can beat a dungeon, no matter which classes they play. I love the idea.

- It's equivalent to raids are open world bosses that can't be tapped and scale with the number of players. A solo player can just jump into the fray, help whoever is already battling the boss, and get his rewards at the end.

- GW2's Arenas will be handled in a similar way to MoP's Challenge modes; normalized gear, so everyone is on an equal footing. It's the way I actually like to do my PvP.

- Instant travel. Roughly equivalent to having a zero cooldown Hearthstone attuned to each WoW inn, and having all flight masters replaced with teleport gates that took you instantly to your destination.

Those are, for the most part, closer to game design philosophies than actual features. Which is why, unfortunately, I don't expect WoW to adopt any of them for the time being; it's not a matter of how skilled the team is, but of where they want to take their game, and the direction ANet wants to take GW2 is closer to my idea of a perfect game than Blizzard's.