This is simply not true. I suggest you to go to any wow page and re-read what you remember about the emblem system. Not to mention how the emblem system wasn't the only way to catch up. What about the icc dungeons when icc came out, ToC dungeon when ToC came out. Yeah ulduar didn't have dungeon, but the starter gear was kind of good. There was not much to catch up to. Vault of Archavon?
Crafting was a thing. Crafting was affordable (orbs from raids were sellable), and yielded the BiS for that tier anyways, so you wanted to craft those, regardless. Buying a crafted item from the previous raid was also viable, the itemlevel difference wasn't this huge like now.
There were 2 types of emblems in one tier, one for high level reward, and one for lower level, so you could work for 2 ilevel bracket stuff at once. Aka 2 slots at once.
Server wide pug community was a thing that recognized your name too, not just your current gear/RIO score. VoA gave you easy loot. Wintergrasp gave you amazing honor too.
Weekly raid quest was a thing that gave emblems and was puggable: bosses from naxx, ulduar, toc, even in icc.
Random dungeons gave emblems.
If you had a guild, they could just boost you and shower you in gear. People used to do this even in pugs, well that was something.
You could be raid ready in 1-2 raid lockout.
Honor farming was very easy. My hunter was in full "shitty" honor gear in a couple of daily hours of play, the biggest task was to FIND THAT PVP VENDOR FOR SURE
. Because i could jsut buy stuff into slots I wanted in the order I wanted. Whaow.
This? Now? I don't even want to raid or log in for that matter on my main, let alone alts.