Honestly I'm getting tired of fighting this battle. Understand that Blizzard had little RPG experience prior to WoW. They had Diablo, which was derivative and more focused on action than RPG elements. Weird for someone in a company (SE) that has a much longer history in RPGs to put WoW on such a pedestal

Wow was a great game, however much of what was great was borrowed from other games, and much of that has been removed. There's nothing wrong with using certain ideas from other games, but it was clear they didn't really understand why they even copied those ideas. Why those ideas helped develop the world and the community was apparently lost on them.

The worst thing was when they started talking about fun. Fun is important, but fun is not hard. In any genre you need to have goals that are bigger than just raw fun. And when WoW devs started talking fun, it meant something that that many people found fun was going away.