Really it depends on getting a good a mature guild. The guild I'm in now is fairly large and the people are all super nice. Most of us are older so that maturity level is quite noticeable.
Yes, the skill tree is really great feature of Rift. You can totally tweak your character to get good combinations of DPS, Healing and tanking. You can even have full builds prepared so you can quickly switch from tank form to DPS monkey.
Another nice addition is the "standard" builds. If you don't know what you want to do, they have pre-approved named classes that automatically allocate points as you level. So starting out can be pretty simple, because you can choose cleric "Steampunk" build and just start playing without doing much research. Each class (warrior, cleric, rogue and mage) has 10-15 of each of these pre-packaged builds.
My feeling is that Rift tried to take the best features of the games so far. They've even taken some of the experience sharing ideas from GW2. By far, Rift is the most actively developed of any MMO that I know of. Weekly events and new content all the time, and this has been happening since the original release. So far it doesn't feel like they are just milking the cash cow now.
