Thanks for taking the time to reply fully; I wanted to find out how strong the pull of the live aspect of the "live" game was. Several people over the nearing 1300 pages have said they'd revisit legacy portions of the game "when the live version is finally finished, no more expacs, done" and as its not something I personally feel, I was just curious why/how much they felt this way, not least because a common argument that otherwise neutral parties bring up is "It will take resources away from the live version of the game".
Regarding pirate server communities, I think a lot of what I have is tolerance and patience, and as such I pay less attention to the ultimately "hyper toxic" elements. People talking about gassing jews or raping or worse... I can't deny what I've read, on Nost, as well as others I've played on. However, I don't think the live servers would look much different if they were policed as laxly as pirate servers are, so I kinda put that down to "people who play WoW" rather than any inherent "legacy vs live" differentiation. Any Blizzard endorsed system would use their automated mute/ban system I'd imagine, and so inherently that side of things would be tempered slightly.
On the other hand, the set up of the gameplay certainly encourages cooperation; so I don't know when you personally started but having an "instant 4 man party" whenever you want to play will make life considerably easier for all of you (herb/alch, miner/bs, skinner/LW, and tailor/enchanter holy moly :P) - but for others it quickly becomes obvious that "not treating everyone you meet as an asshole" has dividends, so on the whole, the personal interactions I've had with players has been great, I've already had offers to join some established guilds and I have a healthy friends list of people around my level to dungeon with
Meeting new people is easy
Anyway, gonna end this before I ramble too much