STO in the Long Run?

So far, I've still very impressed with STO. Although it has a few social failings at the moment, in that the game is relatively simple to solo, as almost every encounter scales with the party-size. But overall I think it's still a good game, well worth playing, and with some interesting mechanics too.

The one concern I have is 'end-game'.

In WoW, you take a level 1 character, play through 19 levels of content, and only then does the door really open up to a lot more content. Which you will strive to complete in order to 'improve' your character, and potentially reach even more content.

In STO, you take a level 1 character (Ensign), and level him / her up to become an Admiral. Each rank has several levels too. So far so similar. But while in WoW you only have 1 set of gear to aquire (not counting dual-spec's), in STO you have many sets. There's yours, at least 5 Crew Members, and your ships (and you may have multiple ships too).
Since STO isn't quite as expansive as WoW, I'm concerned that once I reach the maximum rank, I'll simply be on a grind to aquire massive amounts of gear, to enable me to... do nothing much with.

Cryptic are releasing fairly regular updates, adding new content, and mini-patches to add events. And I like that design. Trickle-feeding updates rather than making everyone wait many months between them keeps people much more interested.
In fact there's a whopping 2GB patch coming soon, that the downloader is already begging me to pre-download.
2GB in the STO universe must be a hell of a lot of content, since 'space' doesn't take much designing, so they must be inserting a lot of extra content. Maybe they're bringing in cities or something? Who Knows.

In fact, the more I write about this, the more I'm beggining to think that Cryptic have got the balance just right. And maybe I'm worrying for nothing. I'm enjoying levelling at my own pace, I'm not rushing for end-game content yet, and by the time I reach it, it'll probably be all that I hoped. There's just that little nagging doubt, but maybe that's a WoW-Syndrome.

WoW endgame got repetitive and felt un-rewarding to me. So I'm just painting STO with the same brush.

But... Elves, and Vulcans. Goblins and Ferengi. Monsters and Aliens. Is it really all so different?

For now.. yes.

Later... Who knows.