I think the textures have improved nicely, though I also have the newer 300 series Nvidia drivers with that new fangled aliasing feature (FXAA) which, to me, drastically improves games like SWTOR, as the normal aliasing was really bad.
TL;DR: I'm actually not sure if it's the drivers or the new texture features they added that improved the look as I installed the drivers last night.
I also play on one of the Heavy servers, so I really haven't cared about the population levels.
As I said before, I was mostly looking forward to rated warzones, so with that removed, I'm not terribly excited with this patch. However, there are some things I find myself enjoying in the hour or two I played today prior to going to work. I'll have more thoughts after I get home and play some more:
1) Small improvements to the UI; casting bars, etc are better defined. Nothing huge, but immediately noticeable. Did take me over an hour to figure out some rather basic things that used to be under Options, but are now under Interface Editing.
2) Casting all class buffs at once. This is actually pretty awesome.
3) The few lower level alts I have are like in God mode with the huge Presence boost they got due to all my Legacy Unlocks. As Presence was a straight boost, rather than a percent, the lower level you are, the more noticeable the effect. To put it simply, some of my lowbie's Presence is double their Prime stats. Their Companions are a tad...overpowered.
Mid 20s world pvp is gonna be interesting when/if I run into someone who doesn't have all the +Presence I have. :/
4) The /operative emote is too cool for words, and all my characters are now being obnoxious while spamming it, especially over dead enemy players.
5) I like the new Warzone, even if it's just a rather uninspired (ie: no real twist to it) basic 'capture the node'.
Now a few things I either outright disliked, or was horribly unimpressed with:
1) Warzones no longer seem to shutdown if you don't have enough players. Not a huge issue, as we usually always get new players joining long before those 120 seconds can countdown (in fact, pretty much always), but I have to object to this change on principle.
2) Still no punishment for players who quit warzones, continuing to make a warzone that your team starts to lose very difficult to fight back from as you go through character after character joining and quitting looking for a quick win.
3) Coupled with it being very easy now to get very few medals on the losing team and I suspect we're going to see a bump in the percent of players constantly quitting games. For the record, I hate quitters.
4) I find most of the Legacy system complete fluff. And, for being fluff, I don't understand why I can't just have all eight of my characters in a crazy polygamous marriage.
Basically, the relationships that are possible are all boring. They really need to let you go crazy there. Especially since it's just flavor and has no practical effect on anything.
I didn't have time to try moving my mods/augments to orange gear, but that's the only thing left in this patch that I was anticipating. Hopefully it works out, as I can't stand the way my level 50s look.
I should have started powerleveling all the professions weeks ago, when hearing about 1.2, but as it is now, I've only got one Cybertech, and 7 Biochem characters. :/ Some of those Biochems are going to have to bite the bullet and pick up Arms/Armor/Synth/Slicing, me thinks, as I suspect the market is going to be prohibitively expensive to buy the items outright from the incredibly few people who aren't currently Biochem.
Plus, it's going to cost over 27 million credits to unlock all the Legacy features, so it's not like I have a ton of money to spare.
Oh, and the number one best thing about this patch that I almost forgot about is that you can turn that retarded Smart Camera off.
Lastly, it seems Bioware is in full damage control mode with the whole 'if you're still an active subscriber, you get a free month and a pet' thing. LoL.