This article very fairly summed up what the U9 experience was for most of us, I think. It suffered, of course, from Origin-itis, in which it was made for systems that generally just weren't out yet. It furthermore suffered from publisher-itis, in this case EA's push to get it out in the stores before the next fiscal quarter. Origin had always been a bit like Blizzard before EA took over…it will be released when they deemed it ready. They may not have always turned out the game everyone wanted to play, but they did tend to turn out the games they envisioned, and they were usually pretty low on bugs. Too bad that changed so drastically once they became part of EA. It's what drove the final nail into the Origin coffin.
All that said, I thought U9 was fun for what it was, especially once I had a computer that could run it. They kept the spirit of world-interaction, mystery, and exploration. The locales had character and charm. The NPCs were less fleshed-out than they may have been, but since a lot of us had grown up with these characters, we projected what was missing onto many of them.
There's so much to be said about this title that I can't cover all of my thoughts about it here; but the author of the article mirrors my feelings pretty well.
Say what you want, but Origin/Garriott are the reason I got into making games in the first place, and I know I wasn't the only one.