Mafia II – What Do You Want to Know?

The open world genre’s conventions as standardized by GTA3, and followed with unhealthy precision by all imitators are rife with problems.
One such is that they all feature obnoxiously large worlds with large distances between mission hubs or other points of interest. Another problem is that these types of games feature one mission template which all other missions are just tiny variations of, making story progression repetitive and devoid fun.
GTA attempted to offset the tedium by allowing the player to make his own fun, usually to be found by just wandering about and causing havoc. Alas once the novelty of going rampages whittled away all one was left with to rely on were the missions, which required time to travel to and once activated were just rinse and repeat repetitions of the same formula. Drive there, kill this person, etc.
Did these design issues ever weigh on the minds of the Mafia II design team? What does Mafia II do to solve these problems? Infamous, for an example, offset the tedium somewhat by focusing on great combat, while Mercenaries 2 relied heavily on making the mechanic of blowing things up fun.
These were baby steps that did little to prevent tedium, so what are your approaches to these problems?