Remember how before cata came out, we use to be able to wall climb up places that you couldn't fly to, like the goldshire roof, or the waterfall over northshire valley, or hyjal, even if there was a threat of restriction, it felt great to cheat the system.
Remember the zombie event, or the blood god hakkar event, when entire cities would be wiped out and spread chaos around. In seeing doom lord kazzak stood at the gates of major cities killing players and having huge raid groups fighting him.
Remember how you found a way to run across the ocean to the devs mysterious island and explore it.
Remember being able to get behind ZA doors, or get past the mountains and explore where Quel'thalas would have been in vanilla?
So much of this stuff has been removed from the game, or made to you can't access it period.
I guess the reason why I'm reminiscing about all these things is, there was always something special about finding these little out of the way tib bits the devs didn't want you to know about, or tried to restrict you getting there, or things that just in general caused chaos to servers and actully took a break from the norm.
I believe this is what wow is missing these days, something that breaks the every day routine, something from vanilla to wrath seemed to get right. Remember the pre cata event with the elemental invasion? I could tell from there then, that blizzard had given up on making events where the player made the rules, and instead create a boring, controlled environment that people ended up disappointed by (as I remember so much of on the forums back then).
I just think the game is held down to much at times for its own good now, it needs something thats not just another organised event.