You said that "It's usually a tacked-on mediocre rehash of the same old." - I don't really see how that doesn't apply to Battlefield 3. It has been done, everything has been done. There is nothing new anymore. The aim in developing a good multiplayer game should be sorting out balancing issues and netcode nowadays.
I think that's a bit of a cop-out. There's still plenty of room for innovation. Publishers just don't do it because it's much easier to pump out another generic military shooter.
Given that it's one of the very few big-budget games with PC as the lead SKU, I really would like to care about BF3. The problem is that nothing I've seen of the actual gameplay looks even remotely interesting. Same weapons, same vehicles, same settings, same factions, same premise, same everything as every other military shooter, only with better graphics. Military shooter is quite possibly the most uninspired sub-genre in existence.