To be honest: Given the massive amounts of content needed for a full-blown MMO (“just making the world”), the challenges involved in providing the service to massive amounts of players (user-support and IT infrastructure = “keeping the world alive”) and the general complexity of even simple MMOs, I’d consider “buddy systems” and “world persistence” kind of trivial things to set up.
After all, a buddy system is not much more than a tiny part of the world persistence. I’d budget even a somewhat advanced buddy system with about a week for one somewhat skilled developer, which is “nothing” compared to the rest of what needs to be done on such a project. On the other hand: even a buddy system, or - much more interesting: a guild system - provides plenty of room for creativity, so that I’d personally not really want this to come “pre-made”.
And “world persistence” could mean anything from “a couple of attributes per player” (which is kind of trivial to implement with Unity, if you have an understanding of database systems and how to develop them) to “everything in the world could be changed by the players - even new content could be created, including new game logic” (which is… well… “difficult and truly challenging no matter how skilled you are” 
).
Where should anybody draw the line here?
When it comes to quests: If such a thing was integrated into Unity, it would be a waste for all people who create MMOs that don’t even have quests (even though it might potentially be useful for people who don’t create MMOs but single-player RPGs ). Besides, I don’t think such a thing could be created in a useful manner that suits even most needs for most game designs (let alone all for all), since questing should in most cases be very dependent on the game design (there’s plenty of room for creativity in this area, too). So even if some folks create an MMORPG, and do have quests in it - it might turn out useless for them because they want to create something different that’s simply not covered.
So all in all, personally I would consider investments into such things from UT kind of a waste of time and money. Might be interesting as a 3rd party offering as what you asked for in your first posting, though…
What I want from Unity (and what I think it currently provides), is being an open door into uncharted terrain. That terrain is what I can create - so Unity supports my creative freedom.
What I don’t like is when Unity imposes boundaries to what’s possible. That was the case with a few aspects of networking in 2.0. But almost all those boundaries have been removed in 2.1! The only thing I still miss is being able to simultanuously connect to multiple servers (AFAICS, that currently cuts out “seamless servers” if you want to take full advantage of Unity’s networking capabilities).
Also “single terrain per level” was one such limitation - which is now gone, which I think is extremely cool. Just to give a few examples (if you read the release notes, it’s fairly obvious).
If instead of an open door I wanted a living room packed with stuff I very likely don’t need, I’d go with something like coquitosalonzo … I haven’t really followed that project and don’t know its exact status (at first sight it seems unchanged during the last 1.5 years), but AFAIK, this project does try to handle some of the really difficult aspects of MMO development (and maintenance)… … … maybe that’s why it seems not too much has changed!?
