Except, this is typical MMO behavior.
When you look back over the last 12 years of MMORPGs, they (for the most part) start out like TOR did.
In relevance to WoW, some might say "TOR is competing with 2012 WoW, not 2004 WoW", but again, WoW started out worse than TOR.
Vanilla MMOs are all the same, and despite how many people want a vanilla MMO to compete with World of Warcraft, it won't happen.