Something I noticed whilst farming archaeology in Uldum the past few days (got the mount on 96th Tol'vir solve wohoo) was how non-subtle the zone is. If you don't see your character or any magic or whatever, you could easily think you were playing a game taking place in realistic ancient Egypt, that's how non subtle it is.
The same goes for pretty much all the (Chinese) content in MOP.
Now, races and zones in WoW were always somewhat inspired by real life peoples and places because after all, the game is made by humans from earth and we only have so much to draw inspiration from. Dranei, Trolls, Dwarves etc all have accents from real life peoples and somewhat inspired architecture from those places too.
However I feel that the difference is striking if you compare the earlier content to the newer, it used to be discrete and mysterious, and you hardly really notice it. I remember someone posted a thread on the general forums back in the vanilla days explaining his theory of what people each race were inspired by and you couldn't really tell if it was true or not.
Now, the themes are just shoved down our throats, and to me it just feels lazy. This is a fantasy game after all, taking place on Azeroth and not planet Earth. I don't know, I just feel like it's an easy way out in developing content. Completely copying an architecture, music, artistic style etc for a whole zone (Uldum) and even worse a whole expansion (MOP) is lame to me.
In comparison with for example the AQ raids. When those came out it was extremely exiting and mysterious, it felt alien and scary doing those raids for the first time. It was like a completely newly invented 'culture'. I hope Blizzard does more of that for the future.