Rather than any immolation analogies, I’d prefer to think of things more phoenix-like than anything else.

Fundamentally, SWG was launched too early from a game design point of view. It may not have been from a financial point of view – there’s considerations like how much had been spent, how soon it would earn back the investment, that sort of thing – but most systems in there were first-pass at best. The place where that was most obvious was in the relative lack of content at launch. The tools simply came on too late to make the volume of content needed, and even though a heroic final push tried to populate the game with distinctive content, it just wasn’t anywhere near enough.