Another thing was how operating the store required a user who understood what was there and how to search in the first place. The interface was bad. It had no way to block bought items. The effort involved reduced impulse buying. I would also put a lot of the veteran rewards in the store instead, along with a ton of the pre-conversion costume pieces. There should be a way to buy incarnate access through a license and invention access should probably not be automatically free in any veteran level, especially since many veterans are uninterested in the incarnates.
Yeah, the store had a lot of room for improvement. I was frequently annoyed by trying to figure out what I had and had not already purchased. And I agree that there should have been a way to purchase passes into every possible aspect of the game.
I often found myself wishing that the CoH store had been implemented more like the DDO store. (No, DDO isn't perfect, but they've done a lot of things very well since going F2P and very quickly addressed issues when they were not working out the way they had hoped.) Free players in DDO don't have access to classes like Monks, races like Drow, and some content like Three Barrel Cove by default. They can unlock some perks through game play on each individual server (Drow can be unlocked by earning enough favor from the various houses), but then need to unlock that perk again if they start playing on a new server. They also have the option of using points to buy game-wide unlocks for just about everything under the sun. They can unlock races, classes, and adventure packs across all servers on their account with single purchases, allowing them to pick and choose which content they have access to. The difference between CoH and DDO here, though, is that in DDO, the only thing VIP players have to unlock are Drow and Veteran character creation. All classes are available to VIPs and all abilities of those classes are available. The equivalent in CoH would be unlocking Kheldians and Soldiers of Arachnos and having access to all ATs and all power sets without having to pay extra for them.
The DDO store also gives access to hirelings, different types of potions, XP buffs, loot buffs, rez items, vanity pets, armor appearance kits, etc. Those are easily equivalent to inspirations (super inspirations, team buff inspirations, dual inspirations); temp powers that buff XP, Inf, or Prestige; temp powers that might increase drop rates; temp self-rez powers; vanity pets (obviously); and costume sets.
And the search bar in the DDO store makes it really easy to find what you're looking for.