I actually found a site that is emulating SWG pre-Sony ^_^ I'm quite excited.
http://swgemu.com/
I think you mean pre-LucasArts major involvement. Star Wars Galaxies was developed by SOE from the start, and although there were some pretty major bugs at launch (or so I'm told), people still enjoyed it. I got involved about 8 months before the CU (I think), and it was amazing. I'm not sure why, but for some reason or another, everything between me and the game just clicked. However, Lucasarts got deeply involved in the development after the launch of WoW, and decided SWG should be more like WoW. With that, the combat upgrade happened. However, this didn't stop people from hitting the cancel subscription buttion. Hell, it actually made more people click it.
Maybe the game was still too complicated, so the NGE was developed. This fucked the game, and that's when I quit. I'd be lying if I said that I didn't care my Jedi was now just a run-of-the-mill character. Perhaps what hurt the most, though, is the fact that crafting was useless suddenly. Hell, my bio-engineer suddenly didn't have a class he fit into. I miss the old SWG, but as I don't have time to play an online game now, I suppose it doesn't really matter.