Yeah I agree, a lot of skills were not unique enough and the leveling process was just so insanely boring. It was an extremely fun game for awhile, but after awhile it felt like I was just doing the same thing over and over and over in the same places in the same ways. I know all MMO's are redundant to a point but you have to add a degree of variety to keep people interested. As I said, and as you said, if you could reroll, make alts and enjoy the game a bit more by getting to the cap a bit quicker it would really make the playability of the game rise. I think MMORPG manufacturers and developers are kind of greedy, they want people to keep playing for as long as possible with minimal effort and development costs so they end up shooting themselves in the foot.
What they need to do is just make gaining experience points a lot easier than it is now. I honestly would come back if it was for that. I think the way Aion is currently set up, that if you gained experience points about 2~4 times faster than you do now if not more, it would make it a playable game. But you can't take a game that already is a bit low on content and expect people to keep playing when all they are doing is the exact same thing, over and over and over with very minimal variation.
In FFXI when you level up, as you go on you get abilities that are drastically different and allow for completely different party dynamics. You also usually gain experience points with a group and it's all about strategy and working together, this keeps people's minds focused and keeps it interesting. Even though I will admit it's boring some times and could use work itself Square Enix has "upped" the experience points given over the years, and given people more options which made people quite happy and enjoy leveling more.
I think NCsoft needs to do the same. Any good game developer should read the trends and hear what people are saying about it. All my friends who quit and people I know who've quit it all quit for basically these same reasons. If you think about it, while you level up you (as you mentioned) have skills that all do pretty close to the same things, and you level solo. So it's like you're basically just killing millions and millions of monsters just by engaging them by yourself and mashing a few of the same skills over and over and over, it just gets too boring. Now if you could get up in the levels a lot quicker, experience end game raiding and PVP and could dress your character up in many different sets of armor a bit easier it would keep people's interest.
I wish NCsoft would do some of these things, as I say Aion has a lot of potential but they're holding it back.