It looks to me like this discussion is being pulled in two different directions, content and quality (actually quality can be broken into client quality and content quality). Well I might as well chime in since I have an interest in one of them, content.
You know, there's a niftly little program (hell, what am I talking about? It's probably 100k lines of code by now) called OpenZone. IT LETS YOU MAKE ZONES. I ought to know: I wrote it. No SOE textures, no SOE models: you can make entirely original zones from scratch, or even make them from scratch in the 3D tool of your choice and import them as .3DS files. Before anyone complains about the quality of any content, you should know that the tools exist for you to make content on your own. If anyone here is a professional 3D modeler and you can do better, you're most welcome to join the effort and submit your own creative vision. The more the merrier.
I realize that there's more to content than just zones, but a library of canned objects (like houses, or anything else you can think of) is also welcome, since it would make it a lot easier for anyone else to create zones. As long as everything you submit isn't copyrighted by anyone else, there is a lot of opportunity to contribute. Someday we hope to make it possible to add mob models as well (the biggest obstacle for me is getting my hands on some free examples that I can read -- we already know how to export a skeleton model as .WLD). The point here is that before complaining about content, remember that you can contribute to improve the situation.
The client itself will improve over time. Expecting it to be some awesome thing off the bat is unrealistic. It will evolve, and you'll have a front-row seat to the process where you can make suggestions, but to suggest that it's useless until it can surpass EQ is IMHO absurd. A client is as useful as its users decide it is, and when a patch breaks EQEmu I think a third-party client fixed to a specific version of the server would suddenly become very useful. I've said for a long time that EQEmu needs to divorce itself from the EQLive client and SOE's patching schedule, and it just might finally come to pass.
I'd like nothing more than to see an OpenEQ that had enough content that one could play satisfactorily without any SOE content. We can all agree that it's badly out of date, and there's something to be said for discovering something new. I'm sure many people here can walk the SOE zones blindfolded and that's a very bad thing.
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