Not that I disagree with you that the player actively doing shit to get attunements, no matter how big of a pain, is still more fun and interactive than the mission table shit, but Vanilla had quite a few attunements my friend. A whole slew of them.
BRD, Molten Core, BWL, Scholomance, UBRS, Onyxia's Lair, Dire Maul, almost all of them had either some kind of key quest (in the case of the dungeons) or a big attunement quest (in the case of the raids, especially Onyxia, I still have nightmares about escorting fucking Marshall whats-his-nuts out of jail in LBRS for the Alliance Onyxia attunement.