I have to disagree with you, you could tell from the beta weekends that the game was never going to be that good, there just isn't enough time and freedom between those and the release date to allow for much to change other than the fluffy parts.
Hardly, everything this game wasn't in beta it is now.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not an ES fan, very fed up with all the fantasy stuff personally and I'm not going to continue playing ESO for more than a couple of months to fully get the grasp of the game as a total whole, but even now, I personally can easily say that ESO is a good MMO, the best out there by a mile, probably mostly for PVP, but there's a whole lot of other standard issues that doesn't exist in ESO. For example quests are nicely different making it much less tedious and painful to level up, unlike every other MMO I ever tried since the dawn of MMOs
I've tried all the other new ones, Wildstar etc, and those get boring very quick unless you're into purely PVE (could change at retail ofc), ESO doesn't, for some reason it just gets better and better, at least for now. There's so much variation, so many ways to play your class, not to mention it's very easy to switch around and learn something new if you want to. Plenty of content coming up plus the adventure zones which seems to be something for all the PVE gimps.
Plus ESO is very simplified, everyone should be able to learn, the WoW generation (first timers) is having a field day
It runs great, FPS is good, world looks nice, graphics are nice. I mean, except for it being fantasy and button mashing combat it's a really well made game, minus the current D/C issues albeit minimal.
I would definitely recommend this game for people who like to open world PVP in MMOs; there's no arena type pvp yet as far as I know.
It might not be innovating but it's as good as it gets.