So what? You are still not being forced to open the boxes and if you CHOOSE to grind for diamonds and buy the keys that way you are buying those keys from people who CHOOSE to buy them with Zen. Either way no one is in anyway forced to do anything.
It's best to ignore min/maxers and just play whatever race appeals to you. Other wise when the inevitable rebaancing happens every year you will just be depressed and feel the need to respec. The racial stats and abilities are pretty much inconsequential to anyone who doesn't have an OCD obsession with doing .001 percent…
Then somehow you got lucky. Not one of the games you mentioned had a flawless launch. Secret World and COH were very unstable and had all sorts of issues the first week after launch and Rift had login issues the first few days.
This is just about every MMO launch ever. I remember when WOW launched. it was all but unplayable for several weeks after launch. And AO was even worse. In this case it's just too many people trying to log on at the same time.
There really isn't anything that can be done to "solve" the lag problem. Sure it can be minimizex but nothing can be done about lag issues on the users end. Which is why they can't have permadeath MMORPGs.