Wow was favored by the hardcore in vanilla, and has slowly been dumbed down year after year after year. Your other points were horrible fyi, if youre gonna be sarcastic and try to say the game was never hardcore lets use decent examples. Like:
When did you have to spend hours upon hours of farming fire elementals for elemental fires for raid night on rag?
When did you spend hours farming gold/mats for raiding?
When did the game favor high end raiders to trump everyone in PvP with amazing epics while casuals were stuck in blues?
When did epics used to be something you had to earn rather then be handed them for sneezing in the right direction?
Also you cant compare a game like EQ to WoW. EQ was not difficult IT WAS JUST TEDIOUS AND GRINDY. Nothing in EQ was hard it just took forever to get anything done. Plane of time/nightmare etc in EQ was a joke, WoW was actually more difficult then EQ was in the beginning raiding wise, if you didnt think so then you must have been horrible at EQ. EQ needed more people then wow ever did for some fights and each fight took 5x as long. WoW had fights that took even the top guilds weeks to get done before they eventually got nerfed.
While I dont want the game to be hardcore, it also cant be too easy and downie proof like its going right now. The game has gone from being required to play alot of hours a week raiding for new loots to welfare epics etc. The PvP gear was the first step in the right/wrong direction because it originally closed the gap between players who just pvped and those who pved, however the pvp loot at one point became much easier to get (tbc) which then turned to the mentality that PvE loot should be easier to get (heroics which then helped close the gap in pve). Now raiding is so easy that in WoTLK a new 80 can get a full set of raiding epics in one night PvE wise, and maybe in 2 weeks if you dont rush? of PvP epics. And instances like ICC were trivilized with a 30% buff to dmg/hp etc which allows people on alot of servers to pug ICC hardmodes lol.
The only challenging istance of WoTLK was Ulduar hardmodes, everything else is pretty simplistic (minus the Hardmode LK, which is more just redic hp/dmg in hardmode not so much the encounter getting harder like ulduar). I dont think anyone (myself included) wants to go back to vanilla raiding, or vanilla inflation of gear etc, but with the new talent trees (yes currently in beta and first implementation) along with other roads the game is going, it looking very dumbed down and alot of ppl like myself who quit WotLK and are hoping CATA is gonna breathe new life into WoW are getting rather disappointed to say the least.
The only pluses cata seems to have going right now
- New feeling to old zones
- Rated Bgs
- Archeology seems cool might be interesting
- new races
- and this guild thing seems pretty cool
- not having to do 10s/25 and being able to do 10 mans for the same loot while not having to wait for joe and his mom to log on because you cant fill a raid lol
While this seems like a lot only 2 or so have long term "coolness" or the ability to keep your attention for awhile. Hope im wrong but well see.
Edit: I do not want the game to go back to taking hours upon hours to get anything done, since i want to play it semi casually in Cata cause of work/friends etc and not wanting to ignore all that to be the "best". But I also dont want it to be so simple its no longer a challenge or requires any thought behind encounters or talent choices etc. While u have sites for that it still takes alot of time and effort to find the optimal set or talent choices etc unless you just wait for someone else to do it and copy.