>>I don't mean to sound amused, fightened or surprised, but my assumption was that devs didn't exactly play this game...
or at least not higher level to see what it's really like <<
Of course we do! There are just a few of us (not me) that have beat the 100 mark so far, most of our normal playtime goes towards working on the game. There are quite a few level 50-100 Funcom characters running around the world, though for obvious reasons you won't hear us broadcast (or even /whisper) that fact.
And that's NOT using any GM help or GM commands. I actually had a GM-powered character I used for testing dungeons nerfed by the exploit team because I wasn't on the list of registered GMs... :P