I don't expect you to take my word on this but I will share with you what I was told by a friend of mine who works for SOE. I can't give you any more detail like his position, department, etc for fear of him being identified. They apparently are bound by some air-tight non-disclosure agreements.
Below is what I was told:
Apparently, the NGE has really, REALLY stirred things up in Austin. All sorts of fingers are being pointed among SOE employee's as nobody wants to take the blame. Right now EVERYONE is trying to distance themselves from being responsible for making ANY decsions on pushing the NGE live. Every single employee is avoiding any connection to the NGE like the plague. I was told that the Dev's expected SOME account cancelations when the NGE went live, but my insider said they were willing to take those vet losses with the hopes of bringing in new subscribers over the holiday sales season. Also, the devs were counting on most of the threats by vets to quit to not actually go thru with cancelling. They have admitted, at least internally, that they number of cancels has FAR FAR FAR exceeded the number they were willing to take. As a result, there is beginning to be some serious discussion of a pre-NGE rollback. Several dev's are in serious jeopardy of being fired, and many many many of the support staff etc are polishing up their resume's because SOE has become the laughing stock of the online gaming community. No longer is it a badge of pride to work for SOE according to what I was told. Even my friend says he is no longer proud of working for SOE because of how they have destroyed their reputation.
Also, after having to report to LA on the NGE results, specifically the account cancels numbers, some of the big dogs from LA have flown into Austin for some serious intervention. No details on what that means yet, but it is known that Smedly and the senior crew at SOE have been behind closed doors for unusually lengthy meetings and have emerged with scowls on their face. The speculation is that LA is gearing up to crack down big time. (I would love to have been a fly on the wall in those meetings)
Because of the signifacant loss of subscriptions, customer service has laid off 25% of their support staff starting the 1st of January with more cuts expected.
All in all, the NGE turned out to rock the player base more deeply than what they expected. Talks are now underway on cutting the game off sometime in the first quarter of 2006. There is discussion with an outside company that is interested in purchasing the pre-NGE code with the aim of running a handful (5 tops) of pre-NGE servers, and maintained with a skeleton support staff. Right now this is apparently looking to be the most realistic result.
I will post more info as I hear stuff.
Added stuff:
Oh, and my insider said the Devs are being intentionally vague on their forum posting and player communication because they want to keep as many subscribers as possible right now. A memo was passed down to ALL Dev's by the SOE execs with a list of topics that are completely not to be discussed or responded to on the forums. It is generally feared by the SOE team that the more info the player base has, the more of them will quit the game.
Also, the game WAS in the pre-development phase on porting to consol (xbox, playstation), but that those cycles have been 100% stalled at the moment because the future of SWG is so uncertain. But I was told that if any Dev posted or said that consol talks were never taking place it is a lie because significant discussions had already been underway with the design teams experienced with porting PC games to consol systems and that the NGE was partly (not entirely) designed to acomplish this objective.
aber uh ... es ist, so finde ich, sehr unterhaltend und ich glaube auch, das mehr als nur ein fuenkchen wahrheit in diesem geruecht steckt.
das hab ich ganz vergessen dazuzuschreiben 
)