Unsaymoon:
I agree with you. The speed of menus and such are things that just slow down the game. I am not as much concerned with active/passive speed/weapon draws and sheaths--its not that bad, but I agree that the act of attacking sort of requires your weapon to be drawn-why not make that a part of any aggressive action against the mob-your weapon is automatically drawn when you ACT against the mob. Sheathing/passive could require an action.

Your comment about crafting has been an issue of mine as well as that of several people I know who have stopped playing. Once one plays WoW, it is hard to grasp crafting an item 10 levels below your skill and still having a chance of failure. My brother's major gripe is that if he is high enough level to craft it, there should be no failure--leave failure for those who are trying to craft above their level.

Instead of macros to equip gear, skills, traits, etc, why not give a character model for each class. When you switch to the new class, it loads your saved model. I know that sooner or later someone will have a problem with even this, but really, wouldn't it be nice if you could switch your skills and gear completely with one button push as opposed to 4 macros that take 20-30 seconds each to activate? I mean you could keep the cooldowns on newly equipped skills---You equip all the skiils at once and then you can't use any of them for 30 seconds (more time for things like exaltation, etc.).

I do have one suggestion for you thought that may help with one of your concerns--

20.) You can do this by building it into your macro. Why not hit Ctrl-1 to turn aoe on, cast a string of buffs, then turn aoe off? Or you can build a macro for your aoe nuke---for example, let's say the 1-key has Blizzard II assigned to it. You could build a macro into Ctrl-1 that would turn aoe on, cast Blizzard II, and then turn aoe off. Both Blizzards would be assigned to your 1-key---you would just hit Ctrl for your aoe spells.

But it is just a suggestion. I actually use my action bar for skills that I must see their cooldowns---most everything else is macro'ed. Healing-buffs? those are all macroe'd. Ctrl-1-8 for Cure II---ALT-1-8 for Sacr II. CTRL-8 and ALT-8 are for my character--they are the same on all macro bars that I currently utilize. Protect/Shell is a macro set always to AOE ON and at the end it switches off. Stygian Spikes/ Stoneskin as well.