It depends on how much effort would be required to earn those rewards in-game. I never played Aion, but from the way you describe its pay mechanisms, it sounds very different to the token.
I'd love for you show me where I can buy said things in the WoW shop
What you are carefully avoiding here is the fact that nothing the shop does helps you attain those rewards. The only way to obtain those hard achievements and loot that you're talking about is with the assistance of other players. The game does jack for you. Yes, it is a MASSIVE distinction.
lol. The people in this debate who like to argue of the semantics of "winning" are those who are trying to argue that the token is p2w. I don't even care to debate them on that anymore because it isn't pertinent to the discussion.
Core to being p2w is that players are pretty much required to pay if they want to compete, regardless of how you define "winning". WoW does not demand that you use tokens to acquire gold, ergo it cannot be p2w. It's that fucking simple.
That strikes me as a very paranoid way of seeing things. And I don't think it's an accurate assessment at all.
That is patently absurd. The WoW token has been around for 6 years already. If your doomsaying had any merit, the game would have been dead years ago. But it's still going strong, in spite of the fact that it has been in decline for reasons that have nothing to with token for 7 years preceding the introduction thereof.
If anything the token is helping to keep the game alive on two fronts: 1) by giving a portion of the playerbase a means of playing for free and 2) by giving some other players who were not prepared to put enough effort in to make the gold they needed for the things they wanted to do an alternative.
My take on it is this. If the game is dying, it's not because of tokens. And trying to scapegoat tokens is only going to result in missing the real problems.