SimCity should be the most amazing thing ever, but it's vision is marred by the fact that both ways of playing it, single-player (private region) and multi-player, are at odds with each other. I tried to answer these questions:

1. If it's primarily a multi-player game, then why are cities so small as to compel 90% of players to want to control more than one.

2. If they knew that we'd want to control more than one city, especially on a private server, why is the UI geared to be only multi-player focused? (I have to load another city to send that city's dump trucks for example)

3. Why can't you request resources/police/etc from cities in the UI, rather than having to ask that player to send you those resources through small chat? What if they're not playing?

4. Why does it have to be always-online, yet all data is sent asynchronously, including gifts to other cities?

Essentially, the maps are too small for being a game where you only play one city with lots of friends, and it's too multi-player focused to have the UI and experience geared towards helping you manage multiple cities. It can't do either to fullest potential. The more I play, and the more cities I try to manage, the more disappointed I am with how this game has turned out.

Am I alone on this?

I agree with some of your points, but I feel a lot of it will be addressed in patches once the servers are squared away (which seems real close). I've found multiplayer to be pretty fun, but there are a lot of efficiency things that need to be added.

I agree with pretty much all that. There's one more thing I'd like to add to the list though.

When you're trying to play multiple cities yourself, it apparently doesn't sync your cities when you leave one city to go to another. Which is to say, it doesn't seem to push the updated city to the server immediately.

Now this could still be an artefact of the servers still being slow, or it could just be how it was designed and it's only meant to updated to the server every so many minutes. I guess we'll only know for sure sometime in the future.

@zeg: From the dev comments on Twitter, it's supposed to be instant / within a minute or so. Playing earlier in the week, it was very slow (to the point of appearing broken). Now that the servers seem to be fixed, I'm able to pop to another city, increase the number of garbage trucks, volunteer them to the first city, and load it back up. Garbage trucks appear, crisis averted.