I just picked up D:OS for myself and a friend. I was mainly looking to see an overall picture of how multiplayer worked. Number of players support, savegames, shared xp, etc. We played our first night last night and both enjoyed it. However, I will agree with you that the singleplayer/multiplayer redundancy is a bit odd. A singleplayer game should be exactly that...singleplayer.
Anyhow, we had a good time figuring out all the new character creation options and dialog result bonuses. Slow going for the first few hours, likely because both of us are very anal RPG players. We probably spent almost 2 hours just in character creation initially. I don't know exactly what time we started actually playing, but looking at our first save it was around 830pm in the training dungeon and we quit playing at 3am. So I'd say we both enjoyed it. I think all my questions are pretty well answered now through playing and some other articles I've read, but thanks for the reply. I think I'll start a singleplayer game now that I have the hang of it and see how long it takes me to get to the same spot we're currently in.
Thanks again.