Well, i personally see no negative side to not being able to choose your own color.
And, unless they've made some big changes from the alpha and beta, your color is randomly picked, so i don't know why so many of you are whining about always being blue.
For the person who said they can't tell who their ally's are if you can't choose your color..... well that just doesn't make sense, because you ally's are different colors almost everytime you play a game of Aok online anyways, so there is no difference.... and if you could never tell who your ally's were in Aok, well, then that is what the freind and foe option is for.
Taking the option out did speed up the starting of games. Often enough in Aok, someone would just have to be a certain color, and the person who started as that would have to change, but if they didn't, the guy would quit. Then you had to go back to the zone, and find another player. This added a lot of time to the start of the game. This would likely happen more often with the bigger games that Aom supports.
Another positive change is it allowed for the Quickmatch system. You can't have that if you choose your color, because the majority of the people buying the game, won't care what color they have, so will leave it on default blue, and everyone will be trying to find a game, with the few people who have a dif color than them.
I would think that you can be quite sure that ES WON'T make any change to the color change, map size, or the way they did nomad, regicide, and king of the hill.
Map size is the way it is, because most people just picked default, and settlements can proabably only be put in when the map size is scaled to the number of players.
(in other words the old map size system of Aok, is not compatible with settlements, much like the Aok color system is not compatible with the Quick match system of Aom)
I think having the game type regicide, as a random map will actually make it more common. In Aok it was almost impossible to get a Regicide game going, and so i gave up on ever trying to play regicide online, and just played RM, but a lot of people play RM with a random map, so it has a equal chance of coming up. And the fact that it is a citadel, not a king with a castle. Rushing appears to still be a possibility (just to contain the enemy until later ages, can't take a Citadel without seige) and so with it being much more like a regular RM game, people will play it. (and map types are much more random than Aok, i've played the King of the Hill map numerous times, and have had maps with dessert, green grass, and ice)
After all that, you may still not agree with me, but you have to realize the truth. You are a small minority. ES has likely tested to death all the changes they've made, and decided it is better this way. And as a result, they aren't going to want to spend however many days that it will take to make the changes you few desire. (if you haven't noticed, most of the posts in this thread are by a 3 or so individuals)