MMOs 4 Noobs

Richard Bartle, godfather of virtual worlds and creator of the original MUD, has an interesting piece over a gamasutra about how nearly all virtual worlds are being designed for noobs. His hypothesis, watered down a bit, is that virtual worlds must appeal to newbies in order to survive, but newbies drive the design of these worlds in the wrong directions. Bartle goes on to discuss how virtual worlds are in a vicious cycle, where poor design elements are introduced by one game, then adopted by future games, and the effect continues to snowball. Very pessimistic piece, with a lot of points I agree with, and one I don't.

Bartle goes into the practice of instancing (when the game spawns a private area for you and your party to explore) and how this is a bad design elements for MMOs. I see where he is coming from in that instancing will take you and your group away from the community...which represents a large part of the MM in MMOs. But at the same time, instancing, if implemented judiciously, can take away a lot of MMO problems. Camping (when a large group of players sit around a single area and wait for a certain monster to spawn) can be eliminated with instancing, as can many forms of griefing (when a player follows you around and does everything in his/her power to harass you and your friends). Guild Wars (which I'll probably keep coming back to a lot in the future since I just pre-ordered it and will be playing in monthly beta events) has implemented instancing fairly well for the most part, but there isn't any single location (yet) that I can travel to that *isn't* instanced. Even the main towns are instanced. It's easy to move between instanced towns, but it would be nice to have one major public hub, where all players could share one instance of that area at the same time.

Anyway, Bartle discusses how no one in the MMO field seems to be innovating. I emailed him to get his thoughts on Guild Wars, and I've also read some people pointing out games like A tale in the desert and second life as being innovative in regards to traditional MMOs (although I get the impression Bartle was talking more towards MMORPGs in his article, which Second Life is not).
Any other innovative MMOs out there?