Personally I like roleplaying mages and priests more than warriors/rangers/thieves/etc. To me, the wand system, since it only affects mages, is a dissincentive to play mages. I'm ok with things being applied evenly across the board but I view the wand system as a way to, primarily, screw over mage classes and newbies.

The main thing you forgot to mention is that the system as it is has one profound flaw that the others don't - they make my class abilities intertwined with the amount of time I spend online. Amount of time spent gathering wands, amount of time spent online to avoid getting hit with anti-hording code, etc, and its part of the class balance. In terms of the affect that has, I'd rate it as an 8 out of 10 in terms of impact in how it affects my playing. Contrast this with the amount of times I've been assassinated/tripped to death getting wands (0).

There's plenty of tactical situations in the game in terms of ranking, cabal raids, deception, gear gathering, quest completion, etc. This one appears to be one that just focuses on making mages a pain in the ass to play. That to me is the difference. I'm actually probably going to delete the mage I'm playing now because I just realized that the overtime I pulled at work last weekend means all my wands will be gone by my next login. Its just not fun to me to spend half of every login gathering wands and the other half thumb firmly planted in ass trying to get a group or find someone to PK. Once you get to the point where you're able to start accomplishing fun things you've dropped 3 hours already and have to leave to go to dinner or spend time with the family or whatever.