I finally got in after two hours of trying, and I can't say I'm at all impressed.
I mean, I knew going into it a lot of what I wouldn't like: The fact that everyone is an attractive and skinny young adult, the fact that they're trying to monetize this thing like making money is going out of style, the fact that it's basically a glorified VRML chatroom and there isn't a ton to do in it.
But there are a lot of really bad lower-level things you don't notice until you're actually playing it. Like how uniform everyone is. I knew they'd be monetizing clothing, but even Microsoft was more generous in its default clothing options - everyone here isn't just young and skinny, they shop at the same section of the same store. 90% of the people you see will be wearing one of three tops, and any of three indistinguishable different sets of jeans.
Or the idiotic design decision to have things like videogames, bowling alleys, and pool tables exist in the physical gamespace. Sure, it's neat-o that you can watch someone else play bowling or pool in real time, I guess. But I'd rather it just teleport me and anyone I invite into a private instance of bowling. Why is physical space a limitation in a virtual world? Why can't more than one person be playing Ice Breakers on the same arcade machine at the same time? Is having an avatar physically there to demonstrate that people are, in fact, using the feature of arcade games so important that we turn away users who want to try it?
Leaving stores is a pain. Hitting circle to leave makes sense, but then having to hit "X" to confirm I want to leave the store and having circle cancel my request to leave is infuriating - especially when you're embedded a few menus deep. To leave the store you have to keep hitting circle until you're at the top level of the menu, then hit circle one more time to quit, then hit "X" to confirm the quit. Hitting circle again throws you right back into the store.
And while we're discussing the stores - there's simply no content yet. Not that I want to pay fifty cents for a ridiculous cowboy hat or a dollar for a freaking virtual footstool, but there are people who might actually want to customize their home experience to get away from oppressive Home logo t-shirts and barebones white furniture in their ridiculous yacht club villa. But even if they do, they're choosing a single footstool, or from a single variety of lamp. It's at a point where you're not even paying for the privilege to be an individual, you're just paying for the privilege to put up more generic crap in your house or a different colored hoodie.
The whole thing is, essentially, a dystopia of corporate entities appealing to eternally rich and attractive twenty somethings, where the idea of work is laughable and people exist to simply consume and be entertained. A world where individuality is defined by how much you spend, and where monetization of a service is more important than whether the service has a reason to exist.
This is basically Brave New World: The Videogame.