Tons of good points m8. I agree with a lot of this. As somebody else already mentioned, Monday's patch is supposed to deal with the text in some way so hopefully that gets worked out.
You might want to try joining an active guild, gives you some more stuff to do. (hunting bosses, digging super nodes, outpost battles.) You are going to need to pick a faction and grind kami/kara reputation so you can pick up high level zone teleports, but it really isn't all that bad compared to other game's rep grinds.
Hopefully these next two updates on the horizon add something meaningful to the game. I assume you've already seem the developer's blog, but if not here is the link.
http://blog.ryzom.com/