Regarding future plans for CoH: check out the Lore AMA article at the wiki:
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Lore_AMA It has the three Lore AMAs collected there. Good stuff!
Regarding Atlas Revived zone changes: I say start off with everything as is, barring
minor improvements. If something happens storywise, or just doesn't make sense in the first place, go ahead and change it, but for the most part I think it should start from CoH and build from there. I do like how you've laid out the entire city in one thing; FYI, the first Top Cow comic's opening scene shows a shot of the city from outside the walls - there appears to be lots of forest (yeah they're sort of non-canonical, just saying - more of my thoughts on that here:
http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,9677.msg153257.html#msg153257).
As for Skyway being the only place with freeways... maybe they were built in a giant circle around the city - Paragon was built before cars were invented, and the trains are pretty good, so maybe the interstates just run in a circuit around the city? Or maybe the Rikti destroyed them in the first war - major lines of transportation ought to go, after all.
Regarding Valiance and Heroes & Villains "opting out" of the licensing deal: are they opting out entirely? Because even if they don't use any story or characters or lore, or even say "this is an alternate dimension", I would have thought they would want to slap a CoH sticker on the game and say "Official City of Heroes Successor!" Just to get that boost, even if they use nothing else.
So like a Moab (DoTA, LoL, Infinite Crisis, etc) type of deal but instead of picking your heroes, you pick make them? :O I don't know if that is what your are getting at, but that would be fun
A CoH MOBA would be SWEET!
With the licensing deal, it could actually happen. I would LOVE to see some sort of porting between a MOBA and CoH of characters - even if it was just costumes onto the MOBA's generic versions of your toon (e.g. all fire / eng blasters, when ported, would become the moba version of a fire / eng blaster) or just a costume onto an existing character.
Regardless, it would still be great to have a MOBA team of Cole and the Praetorians versus States, Recluse, and other Primal Earth folks, or other crazy combinations. The minions could be Clockwork vs. Longbow, or something like that. The plethora of characters and power ideas would make creating new champion concepts pretty easy.
You can do better, loads better. :p Personally.. I kinda like how they do it in DCUO. Just a collection of big empty rooms you can decorate how you like. Just don't gate the furnishings behind drops and let the users buy additional rooms to add on to it (including multiple levels).
Huh - I played the intro mission to placing things in a base, but it seemed to me like I could only place items at certain points - I couldn't move them freely. Is that unlocked later, or did I miss something?
As for 'realism' - who wants that? You can see the pitfalls of that thought process in any Marvel movie.
How so?