Little Big Planet impressions

I had been holding off on picking up LBP, I felt like I saw all there was to see in the Beta. So the first half hour is just patching, three patches! It made me consider if consoles having hard drives is worth it, I mean, you could play Gears Of War 2 and Fallout 3 without a hard drive right? It is clear that hard drives have let developers release unfinished products with the promise of day 1 patches, look at Fable 2 for example they decided to just ship the game without co-op and patch it in day one. I'd rather just have a finished game on the disc, thank you.
After the half hour of patches, I got another half hour of unskippable progression stopping scenes where I had to sit and listen to an old man talk, all stuff I've already heard from playing the beta making it even more boring. Strangely enough the friends leaderboard only showed one of my friends scores, but I know for sure there are at least half a dozen of my PSN friends that have the game, it was either a bug or a poorly explained feature. Next I decided to see what cool levels were out there. I recognized about half the featured levels already. First I checked out the Batman level I had heard good things about. Basically you are just platforming on blank square platforms with some flying bats and batman imagery in the background. Next was the legendary Gradius level. The flying part was accomplished by laying a ton of jetpacks on the ground, so you get a nice Drop Jetpack button prompt while you are in the spaceship. I don't see any levels ever being able to be immersive with these type of technical limitations. Although recreating the first level of Gradius in LBP is surely a technical feat, it wasnt really that fun to play.
Maybe playing multiplayer would be more fun, so I decided to jump in an online game of the Mirrors Edge level, which I was happy to see was there after hearing they are pulling levels that have any copyrighted material (BTW there goes about 50% of the type of levels I was hoping to create). Just another platforming level, but with backgrounds that slightly look like Mirrors Edge. A fourth player jumps in and stops moving, holding the other three of us up in the top right corner of the screen. After about a minute of standing there I see the chat text "Hello!" pop up, great. Not to mention this text appears right over my character. Finally he climbs up to meet us, and accidentally pushes me into a pit of fire, oh that was my last life. Power off. I don't see me playing this game again anytime soon.