Anyone remember the MUSHes? 
On a more serious note, PVE(-C) mode needs some love from the devs, but not the kind of love that it has been receiving. Yeah, sure, we like getting more toys to play with, but what we would love even better is giving us tools to enrich and give meaning to our interactions with other players.
Right now, there’s not a lot to do on PVE servers other than chat, show off your builds, invite people to your purge, and occasionally do a dungeon with someone else. And the only thing PVE-C adds on top of that is the ability to gank others just because you can, like a murderhobo.
Trading is token and gratuitous. It’s not so much a trade as “Hey, does anyone have this thing that I need right now? In return, I can offer a bunch of these things you can easily get on your own and probably have a surplus of in your own storage.” And that will never grow into anything more vibrant and satisfying as long as we’re all limited to crude face-to-face barter.
Conflict is, well, pretty much non-existent. You can engage in friendly, consensual sparring bouts, both on PVE and PVE-C servers, or you can go murderhobo on PVE-C servers. That’s it. Anything more would require some coordinated RP, which can pretty much only happen on private servers.
So yeah, PVE(-C) players live in a shared theme park of our own creation. It’s not like “single player with extra steps” is what we like best, it’s more that we don’t have the tools to make anything better than that.
EDIT: Incidentally, map rooms, transportory stones, and battle standards are pretty much the only tools we have right now. Go to any official PVE(-C) server now, and you’re almost certain to find a public map room near every obelisk. You’re also very likely to find at least one public arena on the server, and many servers now also have a public transportory stone network.