Good or bad, it's interesting times moving ahead thats for sure.
I often wonder what the more precise numbers are. I look at wow as a reference in that many love to claim hardly no one raids but we see numbers every once in a while on this site and something like 70% were raiding LFG - the easy modes of course but still doing end game group content - raiding.They probably have numbers showing raid/pve participation and it's probably low compared to people who pay money to have 12x xp and play story, story, story.
I think SWTOR would be similar but not exact. A large percentage running the SM OPS. 60-70% as a guess. Like wow, the numbers dropping drastically as you move into higher difficulty with the hardest levels having less than 5% playing (IIRC from the MM0-C post on wow)
For harder mode difficulty, I can see where the argument comes from SWTOR in that more play for the story but I have no doubt there are a large number playing SM OPS similar to wow. Which in turn is why I'm so shocked that this coming expansion leans so heavily on story, leaving out any new ops. Leaving only the old ops we have been doing for the past year to 4 years ago but leveled up.
Maybe SWTOR just doesn't really follow a similar wow pattern when it comes to raids but given my server, it sure seems like it does.