Here's the thing though - removing the "down" side of open world also removes the positive, deep side. They two are sides of the same coin. Same with a punitive death penalty, and a slow progression curve. You can't make things easier and less painful, and keep the immensity of the reward.
Also, you lose the inevitable moments of synchronicity that happen when players are forced into community that could never be planned for or designed. That is the beauty of open world MMOs. I hated aspects of the endgame cluster on live, but I loved what accompanied it. You don't get that love without that hate. This informed guild structures, and the entire meta game that was the community. Instances reduce and inevitably kill all that. It creates a smaller experience.
I understand a lot of people prefer that, but I also understand we are talking about different games. I won't commit to a game that has any type of instancing for these and many other reasons that have to do with inevitable design impact. It's like avoiding certain openings in chess because they lead to certain types of middle and endgame. You may not be able to see that during the opening, but it's inevitable and logically inescapable. A seemingly innocuous pawn move during the first 10 moves can lose you the game 30 moves later. Instancing may not be immediately obviously bad, but the results of it are IMO. And that can be seen in all the games that have implemented it.
P.S. LDoN was crap for me, and I actually quit the game for a long time after it. The augmentation system accompanying it was also ugly, inelegantly complex, and game changing in a bad way (and clearly implemented to force players to play longer, and farm instances, not because it increased the fun aspect i.e. it was an SOE-ism that the original designers would never have considered).... but that's another discussion.
P.P.S. I'm still waiting on a link showing 40k active connections per WoW server.
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