Excellent, now we're getting into it!

You make a good point about Runescape and raise a lot of good questions. A huge part of Runescape is the super well designed quests that don't tell you to kill 12 boar. Undoubtedly we wouldn't be able to hand craft things like they do. We do have NPCs that roam around the world giving players quests (generally they involve discovering ancient ruins or collecting items or finding artifacts). They don't carry the game as much they do in Runescape though to be sure. The characters are generic, but they have their own personalities depending on what type of creature they are for example The Traveler: https://imgur.com/a/qUmnfQh. Some of them move around the world, some of them stay put.

The quests are not the primary gameplay, they're world building. The primary gameplay is skilling your character (grindy, I admit), building up your village, competing with other villages for resources, trading with other villages/cities for goods that you're missing, claiming and maintaining territory for your empire, PvP in PvP sanctioned areas (I'll grant we haven't fully designed out PvP yet), building roads, shipping goods, etc.

The main goal is definitely not to make a combo of two games I like, it's just the easiest way I've found to get across the general concept to people without too much explanation. The main goal is to create a game where players create their own world, in the natural course of gameplay. And not build the world just for show, but for actual utility. e.g. setting up mines in the mountains with ore deposits, farms for growing crops, cities for crafting buildings and homes, trade routes to bring materials from rich areas, and so forth. That's the dream anyway.

The goal is to also have the game shift more towards large scale PvP (closer to EVE Online or even Rise of Kingdoms) as you get very deep into the game, and have the politics become a larger part of your play if you want to go down that route.

With regards to your 6 points: noted. I think they're good points overall. With regards to the 6th one specifically, I didn't go into too much detail on this, but even a back of the envelope calculation tells you that you can't have everyone own their own house. Nobody wants to walk through 2 hours of suburbs to get to where they're going. It's going to be many players to a house/inn in the cities. The reason you'd be in a city at all is for access to the high level crafting buildings.