No one except gear grinders were playing the normal content *before* alerts were added. The original content is mind-numbingly bad cookie-cuter MMO cliche Kill X of Y missions that most people had seen so many times in so many other games that they were sick of it *before* CO was ever even in alpha. It was certainly a…
Not a question of what I think. OP asked people to speculate on why the devs did what they did, so I speculated. You're idea of autoleveling people to 40 doesn't seem bad to me, but I speculate that the devs won't autolevel players to the cap.