So, in a nutshell, a frustrating experiment of a game but we can thank them for attempting an experiment because otherwise we're still playing clones. No disagreement here, and the frustrating aspects of the game were indeed a fertile ground for humor as only being forced to make random jumps off skyscrapers can be.
As for the EVE Online ad that followed... I'm grappling for air coming to grips with how awesome that looked yet it was completely non-representative of the real thing. The real thing being that you're just a captain of one of those ships and when your ship is destroyed you just lost credits amounting to several hundred hours of monotonous activity.
Maybe they need to take the players out of the ships and have them play intergalactic news reporters instead, or perhaps just have them watch intergalactic news reporters and turn it into a non-interactive futuristic news TV simulation. Either option would be an improvement.