IMO, the intangible here is what you have pointed out - CoH was made with passion for the end product, not the rewards for creating it.
When you have that great meal, play that great game, etc., the ones you remember are the ones 'made with love'.
Humans can make magic.
Another way to say it is... CoH: developers tried to make a great game that they, and hopefully a lot of others, would love, and hopefully make some money off of it. CO: Developers designed the game to make a lot of money, and hopefully it was fun, too... CoH was designed primarilly to be a great game, CO was designed to maximize profits.
A lot of games these days are making the same mistake. How much money can we bleed out of our costumers? Not, lets make a great game and the players will come.
Blizzard (WoW), created a great game, blew up to 12 million subscribers. Then Blizzard decided to maximize profits per player, and lost 80+% of them since.
Build a great game, they will come.... Build a money sink, they will not stay.
I wouldnt say CO was designed to maximize profits, at least at launch, to maximise profits you want as many people as possible but instead they made a weird parody niche of a superhero MMO with styling that would alienate a good portion of the potential customers as well, as subs collapsed THEN they tried to squeeze the remaining loyal playerbase for every cent they could get with cash shop junk.
That “cash shop junk” had Store Bought IO sets, which allowed me to completely avoid the Invention system on live, so it wasn’t all that bad.