Lots of good posts here !
I definitively don't feel like I play on a server anymore .. or immersed in the game at all.
Everything seems so interface-ish if that makes sense.
Now that I think about it damn Vanilla was magic. There were a lot of issues too, like balancing was really really bad (even worse than LEGION if you can believe that).
At times you even were lost in the world. Feeling the despair.
You knew the enemy horde/alliance team in battlegrounds and hated them with a passion.
Things needed figuring out. I knew everything about LEGION before the game even came out.
One thing that is still good is raid encounter design. I always loved raiding ( I don't consider LFR to be raids and I consider people who only go LFR to be lost souls who are missing the best experience WoW has to offer ).
Normal raiding nowadays is way too easy though. It should be called easy-mode or come-in-and-loot and heroic should be called normal again. Though probs to Blizzard for fooling the bad players that they achieve something.