What did bother me the most outside vanilla where the level fosters. PVP lvl people daily routines that are endless, and caps. Beside that dungeon finder and rain finder is an turn away. If WOW Classic will be continued with everything with that, I will be in. I think you need to give it a go. Perform WOW Classic thru, how it was intended and when you hit 60, feel it out and decide. A warrior leveled 4 decades ago on a pserver. It was my very first play of WOW Classic since 2008. I fucking loved it. I didnt do some endgame that time. Idk what your aims are/would be. Well I love the idea of playing WOW the way it was back in those days. Without updates and any attribute plans I think I might look for a different game which may give me that nostalgic atmosphere.

Well, I am on Mirage Raceway and the encounter was anywhere as"optimized" as you are assuming. I was ahead of the curve (dinged 60 on Sept 6th), and yet I frequently grouped while levelling with people who did not quite know or remember dungeons well. Heck, hardly any group proved to be a melee/spell cleave, and none of the first level 60s (at Horde-side) got there via dungeon farming or AoE farming. Heck, the very first lvl 60 Horde-side was a Druid, of everything.

So I'm pretty sure, unless you're hellbent on playing something like Herod or Firemaw, you can have a fun, encounter that is TBC that is not. Especially since the original TBC experience was a lot more min-maxed than in Vanilla (EJ already existed in that moment, and while raid knowledge wasn't widespread, course understanding was, such as BiS lists and all ).

What you are asking for is a match in the spirit of WOW Classic, maybe not WOW Classic Warcraft. Blizzard may get for this, but I believe they need to see the current servers during their WOW Classic life. They are not likely to make modifications to phases now, it will not make sense. Perhaps with the launch of TBC they'll relaunch WOW Classic servers again with a few modifications (tweaked raid supervisors, herb spawn times), however you won't get it before then. Also - a few of your points are contradicting. "Raids are too simple" vs"Consumables are too expensive" for example. The availability of consumables creates the raids (slightly) harder.

Check out https://www.mywowgold.com/Wow-classic-Gold.html for more details.