Long time SWG player myself, and this is a nice piece of work...
Yeah I remember the New Game Enhancements well, and actually it was really cool after you got used to it. Massively different way to play, but cool.
Of course, it got less cool once they did their massive balance pass and radically amped the difficulty.
It's a great idea in theory to amp the difficulty so that some things NEED a group, but with the exodus that occured with the NGE of a decent proportion of the player base, it became too much of a pain to actually GET a group. And that made the idea not so good in a practical sense.