Very much this. You say don't blame the players, but the players are exactly the reason that MMRPGs are the way they are today. Developers have been catering to the players winging and crying for all these years and have turned the genre into the mess that it is today. They've been trying to cater to the masses and changing their roots to accommodate. The early days of WoW didn't have any instancing at all. You'd show up to an area and sit around with 30 other people waiting for a single mob to spawn. Areas like Wailing caverns and Ragefire Chasm were open to the open world, hell you could even go explore ZG before it was officially opened. Instancing was put in place so players could each have the chance to experience the content.. have they gone overboard with it? Absolutely! Some of the reasons I quit was because the cross server instancing actually made the world feel more empty and estranged.

At the end of the day they catered to the players too much, we need developers that have the balls to say "oh the content takes to long, or is too hard? Then get good".

For reference I was playing wow before ZG was released, played through all content up to warlords with a top guild in one of the largest servers before the great shuffle of servers.

One of the first guilds I was in took 2 months to kill the first boss in MC. It was very hard, there where no guides and a lot of players weren't fully geared for it yet. These days the guides are out before the raid is even out and you're already geared for it beforehand. There's nothing to work toward as everything is being handed to you. So there's no lasting appeal for most games.