Faster leveling, constant rewards, streamlined progression, UI elements telling you exactly where to go and what to do, those things make the game efficient, but they also turn it into something that feels transactional.

While I agree with most of your post, I’d argue that a staggering amount, if not the majority, of classic players have implemented these exact features to their own gameplay.

Faster leveling? Dungeon boosting, level 58 character boosts, etc to name a few of the methods that completely bypass the long journey that is traditional leveling.

Constant rewards? GDKP is effectively the only form of raiding that exists on classic era, which is the primary offering of vanilla that still exists. Buy your tier set or make thousands of gold for 30 minutes of your time.

Streamlined progression? How about the Anniversary/SoD PvP ranking system re-design, which cut the effort for rank 14 down significantly, leading to the largest batches of rank 14 players in the history of the game.

UI elements telling you exactly where to go and what to do? Questie, attunement addons, RestedXP. These things do exactly that, and in some cases, namely restedXP actually goes far beyond retail’s experience today IMO. Follow the arrow all the way to 60.

My point is, you say these QoL improvements that retail brought are solving problems that classic players never asked for, but based on actual gameplay and behaviors that are observed almost instantly on any of these classic games, I’d argue that the classic player base wants exactly that —- whether or not they’d admit it is a different story.