I said online sucked out of the box. But I'm saying other things like MyPlayer and Association, which were broken as well, should work better as well. In a perfect world, all of this stuff would work and we wouldn't have to wait 3 months for a patch to fix it like we did this year. But the online thing is a simple server thing more than anything else.
The lag, disconnects, f'ed up crews - that all should be relatively simple to fix. But perfecting association mode and making MyPlayer better are to me bigger fixes than online play. In general it should always be offline fixes > online fixes. But that's just me. And the thing you mentioned are more gameplay problems than online problems. So yes those are gameplay fixes that are needed, but not b/c of online.
And can I just say one more thing - NO MORE WHACKED OUT ANIMATIONS IN THE PAINT! This is a must, they must at least be toned down more, again the patch helped, but it's still a problem.