My opinion on Factional Warfare

to be fair, the patch offered some more - bugfixes, a bunch of new ships (although only one is really new, the rest is faction versions of existing cruisers). And yes, the align-to button. Which is basically an automated version of what players in higher level missions and PvP have been doing for ages (directing their ship towards a celestial object in order to warp to it almost instantly if shit hits the fan).

But for a major content patch with the long-awaited, long-hyped factional warfare it's disappointing, mainly because factional warfare as such is disappointing. Most of the "fluff" to FW comes from video trailers and stories of events players can't do themselves, and you've written enough about the mechanics of FW and why they don't achieve what they - in my opinion, too - should achieve so I'm not even getting into where FW fails on a gameplay level...

The purpose of Factional Warfare was not to create some marvelous new gameplay mechanic; devs have said repeatedly that they it's just wardec applied to the four empires with some modifications to system sovereignty. The whole point was to provide an entry point for the relatively cutthroat PvP of EVE Online. Factional warfare is intended to provide something of a happy medium between the heavily policed, "carebear" high sec environment and 0.0 alliance warfare, an easy entry point for new PvPers. In that sense, it is a huge step forward for the game.

Besides that, players being able to affect the boundaries and power of the heretofore invulnerable empires is significant.

I'm not even going to get into the "massive feeling" of the game. You obviously have not participated in PvP at any level since you don't know what the Align to Warp function does for combat, but I am reasonably certain that you would change your mind if you were involved in just a fleet battle. There are near-constant fleet battles (involving hundreds of veterans and newbies each) all over low sec now because of FW, by the way, so it couldn't have been so great a failure as you make it out to be.

The devs never promised more than what's there now. Amazing lore, a nifty website, and some of the best trailers I've seen for an MMO do not constitute delusions of grandeur, just competence. It's also a totally free content, so what's the big deal?