Yes instead of City of Alts is all about the max level grind now.
Huh...interesting. Certainly a flip side to what it used to be. Maybe someday I'll reinvest...still on a Rift high and waiting to see how SWTOR pans out.
Honestly though, CoH did for me what Rift is doing for me right now...keeping me sane and interested in MMOs till the next great thing comes out (the former being WoW, ladder TOR). Amazing how is all worked out like that.
"Those lights, combined with the polygamous Nazi mushrooms, will mess you up."
"Tuning me out doesn't magically change the design or implementation of said design. Though, that'd be neat if it did." -schild
For a lot of players it has always been City of Alts. Those are the ones who stuck around the longest and hence have had the greatest impact on the player community, who in turn tell the devs what they want.
If Incarnates hadn't been so poorly implemented in Going Rogue (and then pulled just before Going Rogue was released, with the devs saying they now realised they had to offer something better than just, "You buy your slot and now you are an Incarnate! Grats!") I would have hung around. Probably. But grinding out the same task forces to get components to fill Incarnate slots just sounds deadly dull to me.