Vanilla leveling was always a bit tedious just like any expansion, the class quests were sometimes enjoyable. Also the reason why people go with the classic hype is that it's plain nostalgic, stepping into a game genre where you dont know squat as a 12 year old. Now however, we know how these things work and there are no more mysterys anymore regarding the ingame lore. We have seen them all. My advice is that if you want that feeling again, you need to play a different mmorpg. There is guild wars 2, FF14.
I do have to agree that professions are useless now except for cooking and alchemy.