Part of the problem with the 'just stream the assets' idea is that yes, you can do it, but it's really expensive to do because of the wide-ranging impact it will have on your game design. This is easy to miss when you test it out on simpler games because the scale isn't big enough for the problems to become visible. To provide a concrete example:

I worked on a title that was one of the first 3D games (if not the first) to do pervasive streaming. Any new player could go to our website, click a link, download a 50kb .exe file, and be playing the game immediately - the .exe would bootstrap itself by downloading the core runtime bits (roughly 4MB worth) and then load up the full game client which would begin streaming down textures, models, and sounds to get you into the game. The game itself had something around 6GB of assets (if I remember right) and as expansions were released the total size of the game's assets grew closer to 10GB (and is probably far past that now).

Players loved it, and the bizdev guys loved it because it meant we got more players in the door and got them playing faster. It also had some great secondary consequences - we could roll out a new update, and even if it changed content, players could be back in the game and playing within minutes. It's still one of the most memorable things about the game and even now few games have replicated the experience.

During my time on the design team, the streaming technology seemed like solid gold. The designers didn't have to think about this technology (as far as I knew), and didn't have to do any work to make it happen. We just built content and players were able to see it really easily.

Despite all this, the big-budget sequel to the original game will not use streaming technology. It moved to the model all the big names use, where you download a huge blob of files and they get unpacked on your disk, just like World of Warcraft.

Why? It's subtle:

The idea of being able to stream assets on demand to players means that strange and sometimes terrible things could happen if you don't carefully think through the entire design of your game. One rather tricky example that I missed during my time as a designer (but realized the depth of as an engineer) is that in a multiplayer game, because players can enter and leave an area at any time, you need to be ready to load all the textures and meshes for a player's equipment and character customizations at a moment's notice. What happens if you're missing the 50MB worth of assets you need to render that player? Is he invisible? What happens if a player is invisible in a Player versus Player game match? What happens if a player is invisible in a ranked tournament for cash prizes because the other players don't have his textures cached?

It goes further if you think about it - entire classes of design tricks and content aren't possible in this model because they imply being unable to know in advance what content is needed. Something as simple as randomly assigning a monster a set of skills when the player enters isn't easy to do, because that means that the level now depends on every skill in the game along with potentially all the assets for those skills, because the actual list of dependencies isn't known until the player has already entered - at which point it's too late.

Anyway, the point of all this: Artillery aren't the first devs to aspire to solve all these tough problems automatically for their customers, and they won't be the last. They're pretty smart guys, so they've got a decent shot at it, but the real issue is that some of these problems aren't solvable with technology because they are fundamental design limitations for the kinds of games people build today. Hat tip to the post author for acknowledging this with problem #6 (the CEO of a firm once tried to convince me that it was possible to work around the speed of light with his brilliant physics technology...). Ultimately, the winners will probably be the people who instead of trying to work around these fundamental issues, make the issues as easy to understand as possible and provide great tools to mitigate them. Hopefully Artillery takes that path.