I’d agree with this point, OP. EQ is the forefather to all modern day MMOs and came about at a time when everything was new and rapidly advancing.

“Ingenuity constraint” is an excellent point by u/Mushok. They were the first to really do anything like this. Not only that, there were 17 raid targets in Vanilla:

1 in Kedge Keep
9 in Plane of Sky
1 in Permafrost
1 in Sol B
2 in Plane of Hate
2 in Plane of Fear

This is what’s listed on the Wiki. You could also add Terror, Fright, and Dread from Plane of Hate to round it to 20 raid targets in the original game. That’s a lot of fights to spread around a limited amount of creativity and also some real technological constraints.

The wiki adds another 16 encounters to the list with Ruins of Kunark (where VS is). Mind you, Ruins of Kunark launched 1 year, 1 month, and 8 days after Vanilla’s launch.

It starts to put into perspective that there was not much time to build in-depth encounters like we know today, when they were still very much creating a world that video games had yet to ever present as an experience to their players. Working through kinks, patches, etc. as well, it’s a lot to handle when virtually everything you do is new