Goal, as you put it is the perfect example of whats wrong in AO.
Reaching 200 back in the day was quite an acomplishment but what was different was being 200 you still were not "godlike". 220s are.
There was alot more roleplay back then too. Like the fights in Sabulum where PVPing decided the outcome of a storyline incident. Players want their efforts to matter. Other games that have this *soul* and.. yes I hate to keep harping on it but EVE Online. Players can join their Empires Millitia and Fleet up and go wrek some havoc on the other Empires stations and jumpgates. The price being they are KOS to other Empires NPCs. This is great.. it adds "feel" to the game. If I wanted to I could join the Amarr Millitia and through my actions actualy and factually expand my empires control of space. That is.. my in-game actions have an impact on the game world itself. Or I can form a corp and wrest control of 0.0 space from some other corp. That is.. again.. my in-game actions have a direct impact on the day to day factual setup of the game world.
You could boil it down to AO being too static. If what guns you could get and how many were available was decided by how many clan attacks against omni resource outposts you stoped then players would care. Leveling to 220/30/70 is fun once.. maybe even twice.. just as a goal on its own. But as my wife and another ingame friend said... "When I first started playing this game I thought that the missions I was doing had a direct impact on the game world. When I realized this wasnt the case the game became nothing but a grind for levels and ego. I was so dissapointed. There was no storyline, no Role Play, no change that I could effect that had lasting consiquences on the game world or story. I felt locked out, left out of the story. I was just some observer and my character didnt matter at all. It was the biggest let down ever."