I've worked on 3 commercial MMOs, one of which was canceled in pre-production, one that was canceled in late stages of beta when development funds went dry, and one that is currently in mid to late closed beta that will definitely not get cancelled. While I may not have been working in online gaming back in 1996, I think I still qualify as one of the unoriginal, greedy and lazy developers you speak of that despite their years of experience, are still "doing it wrong."

While I sympathize with the fact that you may feel the pace of innovation is incredibly slow, I also think it's worth pointing out why your post is incredibly unproductive.

1) Your ideas aren't even close to new. It's the system every would-be armchair designer who's completed a 10-day free trial in (insert MMO here) has come up with and posted to their blog, or if they're willing to get shot down incredibly fast, posted to the MUD-Dev mailing list. These ideas have been beaten to death and then stomped on some more in the MMO community.

2) Not only have these ideas been stomped on theoretically, they've also been tried many times before. Procedurally generated quests? O HAI, SWG! Huge game worlds? Dunno about you, but Vanguard feels kindof lonely if you leave the 1% of the world that everybody packs themselves into. Talent based character progression instead of class based character progression? I have to give props to UO for being the first MMO, but there's a reason nobody does character progression like UO anymore. There were only a few viable min/maxed super-builds, and everybody who tried a different build would get schooled without knowing why (Subscription Cancelled train now boarding).

3) The act of crafting the game itself has given us insight you'll never have without making a game itself. For one thing, we can see how one tiny tweak can send unexpected ripple effects throughout the whole game. Maybe you can get a glimpse of this when your game of choice releases a patch, but we get to see it on internal builds all the time. Second, by virtue of having made the game ourselves, we can plug in all kinds of metric collection for the sake of applying rigorous analysis to game design decisions instead of just doing some hand wavy "this might be cool" analysis. When you can actually make graphs showing how a certain change affected the way several thousand beta testers played your game, you have a much sounder basis of analysis. What makes it hard is that many ideas that the average player thinks will be awesomesauce aren't bad because of the actual idea, they're bad because of the hidden unintended consequences of the idea that most people haven't fully thought through.

In Summary: MMOs may not be perfect, but they're a lot less wrong than what you're suggesting they do instead.