Golarion and Paizo APs absolutely rock, because not only is the art, writing and maps all top notch in my eyes; the world is also pretty well-designed, "sandbox-y" and represents the "shades of grey" morality rather than "black-and-white". The difference to FR canon is that Paizo products generally detail only a couple of locations within each area, concentrating on "what is the stuff most useful to most DMs" instead of minutiae (and since I've already got FR for this, I don't need it here -- and if I occasionally *do* need precise details, I can apply my FR lore to Golarion). What I also love is their online support for their stuff -- I can actually tell my players to download the Player's Guide and say that it's what their PCs know without having to "infodump" them myself (whether they read it or not is up to them). All in all it's a beautifully executed concept that appeals to hard core FR fans like myself (there's enough lore to fulfill my needs most of the time) and those do not care about minutiae (the canon lore does not seek to encompass everything).
Uhm...isn't this exactly what WotC did with 4E FR? They now give a general overview of the area and add a small bit of specifics before moving onto the next. So someone coming to 4E FR for the first time, w/o the expectation of all the canonical detail from prior editions can look at it pretty evenly compared with other settings. I'm sure it irritates those who liked the huge amounts of details, but obviously WotC felt the others who said it was getting to be too much and people felt hemmed in were correct and they did what they felt was needed to open the setting up.
Now FR is sandboxy and there is no need to infodump. You can let them read the Player's Guide and maybe give them a few more specifics about the area you end up playing in, since they would be more familiar w/that area.e FRPG doesn't detail the world at large, but it does cover all the gods and all the aspects needed for creating characters, which is what it should do
