I enjoyed reading this review. I can relate to your early experiences. I also first rolled a warrior in Vanilla. It was much closer to the end of vanilla WoW, and to this day my warrior still runs around with the mini diablo instead of the panda cub. Sadly, its a remade warrior, because at some point my account got hacked when I was in Iraq. I was able to recover the account, but not my original characters, which caused me to stop playing for a while. My experience was also more of a run around and do everything instead of a focused playstyle to beat the raids. I was convinced to play again in Wrath, and that was also some of my best times in the game. Its when I became absorbed, addicted, and realized just how much more I could have been doing in my earlier experiences. That addiction lasted until the end of MoP, probably because I met some amazing people in early Cata that I still play with to this day, but I never truly stopped playing the game. I just took a big step back.

I disagree with some of your points about the current game, but that's based more on personal opinion and experiences rather than an objective view of the game, so I'm not going to debate them in this post.