TBC > Vanilla. objective fact no further discussion needed.Everything past Vanilla is bad.
Watch this video (He is 100% right)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MNF...v=9MNFWhCw8dg)
Focus on raiding actually became a curse as he said. When they catered to that small demographic and the even smaller demographic of autistic people who think MMO PVP should be a esport (and I was one of those idiots at one point), the game got ruined. I'm not saying it's all Blizzard's fault either. Loudmouths on forums are just as responsible asking for idiocy like arena. A lot of the mistakes was catering to what they thought was the majority.
TBC had too much difference in gear level, too many raids and too big a gear carousel, that isn't even worth it for pvp players because resilience was stupid. At everything else? It's a really bad MMO. World PvP doesn't exist. Community was awful outside your guild and non existent and cross realm BG's also added to this. TBC had the precursor to LFD, it's just most people didn't use it because the heroics were so darn hard at first. No Wintergrasp to try to make up for lack of wpvp. It was flawed, but at least something similar. Not alt friendly at all. Small world that sucks compared to old Azeroth and made smaller due to flying. Dailies that are done by zombies that suck to try to make up for the fact they killed organic content that happened on the way to dungeons without flight or farming in the world. Again I'm not saying WOTLK is a great MMO, it just does all these dumb minigames better than TBC.
Vanilla WoW was more than just a PVE raiding game, its about WORLD and organic content. TBC isn't. It's small, limited and shallow.