I was just in an AV pug as alliance where the horde managed to take all the GY's and then bottle up the alliance in the cave, resulting in a near zero bonus honor ass kicking of the alliance (198 bonus honor for the alliance 4554 for the horde... . 110ish avg honorable kills for the horde, only 15ish for the alliance)
It seems in recent days that the horde are not just steamrolling the alliance pugs, but also actively defending towers and lieutenants to prevent the alliance from getting any bonus honor (or substantially limiting it). I've done about 70 or so pug AV's in classic now as Alliance and 3 of those were wins. The other 67ish were almost always not even close, they were complete ass kickings.
While of course this speaks volumes about things like afk'rs, the horde's better PVP prep and coordination, the effect on pugs of good alliance players always going with premades, etc., I think the more troubling thing is that this is not a sustainable situation for the game.
The time and effort involved to play AV, (even if playing to someone = afking) is not worth it for 198 bonus honor. That means that once Alliance have the rep they need from AV, the vast majority of players will stop suffering through AV battles.
Less alliance playing means the Horde ques will get even longer, which is surely going to be frustrating to the horde players, which will eventually cause them to give up on AV too because then they will have super long ques (1+ hour?) only to have a very strong likelihood of facing an alliance pre-made, or worse, an alliance team of afk'rs. It will also mean for horde that reaching the highest pvp ranks requires 18+ hours a day of AV and is only accessible to people who bot or account share.
In retail wow, it doesn't really impact much (at least not fatally) when people chose to completely ignore BG's. PVP and PVE are for the most part completely separate game paths and you don't need any PVP in order to be competitive at PVE and vice versa. However in Classic, for many classes and specs, much of their BiS gear for PVE comes from the high PVP ranks.
When players (horde and alliance) decide that the high rank PVP gear is simply unobtainable to them (due to frustration as alliance, or the inability to meet the time requirements as horde) those players will get disheartened and frustrated with the game. I suspect many will quit. And ironically, given how the PVP ranking system works, having less people playing (and PVPing) will make it harder for everyone to get higher ranks, further speeding the death spiral.
In Vanilla, when there were problems with the game, there was at least hope. Blizzard would say that they were looking into a particular problem and would hint at making changes in a future patch. So the community was willing to endure game-mechanics that were obviously broken.
In classic however, we are ""hopeless", we have self-imprisoned ourselves with the strict mantra that classic must be "pure". And while I too want it to be pure, I realize that it cannot be 100% pure and survive. I think that some "tweaks" need to be made by Blizzard to keep the game fun.
I don't know what the tweak would be for AV (change the PVP rank system? Maybe make WSG and AB as meaningful as AV?), but I do know that keeping it like it is, with Alliance pugs no longer being worth it because even the bonus honor is disappearing, is not a sustainable situation and will ruin it for both sides.