Neither gearscore or resilience is inherently a bad thing.
I would argue that the process of obtaining and depth of the gear itself is more important.
When I think back to the arduous task that was obtaining epics back in vanilla it is obvious why we valued them so highly. You have to compete against more people for drops off bosses because there were forty people in your raid. This generated a sense of loot scarcity. If you didn't have the most DKP in your raid you knew that it might be several months before you received a much needed drop because you needed to 1, have enough dkp. and 2, it needed to drop. As I stated earlier in the thread, the loot tables were less forgiving back then. Further, in recent mmos they have adopted a sort of "smarter" loot drop system which lowers the chance of dropping X class gear if X class isn't in the raid.
In addition to the inflated demand for loot, the loot itself was more interesting. There were funky procs, on use effects, and bizzare passives you could see as being helpful... Sometimes. If only one or two of these items existed at your tier, their value sky rocketed for that player. We don't see those types of items much anymore. Its mainly +400 stam + 300 str +120 crit rating. Not +20 stamina chance on hit to apply elder's special bad touch to target if target is under the age of 10.