SWG was underrated before. Now it is horrible.
The NGE has changed combat from strategic selection of special abilities to poor first person shooter style combat that doesn't even have collision detection. In the past you could select skills from 30 professions and now, after the NGE, you can select one of 9 and other than that (and your armor/weapon) there is no character customization at all! Poor combat and poor rpg elements results in a poor experience.
The NGE actually made the beginning of the game a bit more exciting by having the player get rescued from Imperials by Han Solo and it improved upon the quest system, but overall it is a big disappointment. And that isn't even taking into account mentioned the plethora of bugs it has introduced! The NGE should have been in testing for months before they pushed it to the live servers. In addition to fixing bugs, perhaps in that testing they would have realized that the NGE isn't a very fun 'new game experience'.