Have you played the console versions, Johnny? (edit: you have, I should read earlier posts, lol)
I played a fair share of the PS3 version online and it was a huge headache mainly because how slow the console is itself and the painfully long loading scenes. The game loves throwing you into a random online server (let's just call them servers for the sake of sanity). There is an option to join other crew members, but sometimes that didn't work out very well either. These were the only options in the PS3/360 versions when playing online:
Personally, I liked playing in a server by myself to join jobs and whatnot, but to accomplish this was annoying in itself. I had to:
-Start the game and wait 5 minutes for the game to load single player. If I chose to boot up multiplayer, it would just throw me in a random server full of people which is what I didn't want
-Once the single player loaded, I had to pause the game, go to it's online option, and join a closed room which is for friends/crewmates only and then wait another 3 minutes for the multiplayer to load.
Basically, 10 minutes to get to where I wanted to go online...and don't get me started on the disaster of trying to find a coop mission to join...sometimes I would get stuck in an infinite loading scene, host wouldn't start the game, or the people I would play with just plain sucked so I would have to wait another 3 minutes to back out of that game to go back to an online game for it to throw me into a 16 person room again.
Ugh...here is to hoping the PC version is MUCH better (which it should be because I won't be running the game on ancient PS3 hardware). Apart from heists, the PS3/360 versions are forgotten about. At least now though I'll have people to play the game with.