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I like some of your ideas, especially using magic for area denial instead of just damage.

I think the main problem is that you have this huge boner for the big battle scene in Return of the King while ignoring the fact that it will never work in a game for one reason: human nature. You won't get this cool, choreographed stuff with ogres hauling huge siege weapons, timed cavalery charges and dragons dive bombing infantry.

Instead, you will get the same crap we had in every MMORPG with multi-group PvP combat: two 100-man zergs pussyfooting around each other for an hour with little more than lame-ass skirmishing. From time to time one zerg will manage to mount a full-scale attack and the other zerg willl break within seconds and flee, just to regroup somewhere else. That's why we have 8 hour AV instances in WoW and that's why we had hour-long stand-offs at walls in DAoC RvR. Sounds cool on paper, will be lame in reality and not even the most invisible UI will change that.

I also think it's time to seperate the MMORPG genre into two distinctive styles: MMORPG and MMOARPGs. A for Action. I believe that the clickly action formula with a minimalistic UI you describe is indeed much better suited for PvP than what we have now. I'm under the impression that Age of Conan, Darkfall and Tabula Rasa will deliver just that - hopefully they'll do it better than DDO.

I do not believe though that this woukd the right direction for traditonal EQ-style PvE-MMORPGs, which traditionally take more of a CRPG stat-based approach to gaming which I personally find more fun than clicky combat.