I don't get why people get nostalgic about vanilla gear, it was often horribly itemized and there was no variety. Then there were completely stupid circumstances like being a DPS warrior and not choosing Blackhands Breadth meant not having a decent dps trinket until you raided BWL. I mean seriously, they put in a one time quest, and if you choose poorly you are pretty much screwed over because GMs won't change your trinket (I was given a warning back then for asking twice). Oh yeah and it is great when they simply don't itemize certain slots for your spec for several tiers, which results in you wearing Lionheart Helm all the way up to Naxx! Plus bosses only dropped like 2 pieces of loot for 40 people, so you would end up having to farm multiple tiers forever because some items simply never dropped.
And don't even get started on certain class specs being completely unplayable... or for that matter certain CLASSES (Im looking at you druids!) being completely useless in raids in vanilla. If they released vanilla with today's standards the game would be considered a complete failure. Congratulations to everyone who played and raided in vanilla, you spent an absurd amount of time playing a completely terrible game. (yay 300+ days /played on my warrior by the end of vanilla)