Some stuff here is still relevant, for example the ones that chose to stay, they stay because they have established friends and follow the community. They stay because its easy for them to reroll other class/Specs and have fun. But some people here pointed out that warmane doesnt make life easy for them :
-you can no longer boost your char throughtout leveling (xp is divided by /10 when high level char its the mobs ....)
-The whole reputation thing (enter hc, gear from rep etc...)
-Long honor grind (but thats tbc so i guess its okish)
I have leveled over 20+ chars to lvl 70 using the method that consisted in having one (or more) lvl 70 following the new char and killing npc for him (not in group i just had to tag the mob and get full xp). Now that it isnt an option anymore i decided that i wont get over leveling here anymore. I would be as reckless as saying that warmane did that so people wouldnt make new alts ?? Nerfing xp gains doesnt make any sense to me.
Went through the long rep farm like 10x times or even more, and i can tell that now its a "not anymore" if i'm about to get a new alt i'll just buy etherum keys and thats it. So then again you see less and less normals forming.
As for content itself. PVE, For 1year and 6 month i raided with mirage, we went through hardcore T5 (insane KT....), then EASY hyjal, then 12hours strait sunday on BT release to get R1 illidan kill. Afterwards we went to insane muru, wiping hours, and finaly got r2 on KJ after panacea. So i cannot say i didnt like it I just loved it, as you said it was super challenging and fun. Once maybe but not over and over... And especially for lower tier bosses (as T5/T4).
As for PVP, the scene is really foggy. People doing BGs for fun on tbc are still having fun i guess, minus the complains about afkers, botters, low geared people etc... By the way low geared people are a nice sign (i guess) since it means new players keep joining and are in the gearing prosses. With the surge of some BGs heroes on the ally side from Feenix ally side looks like they are having some fun (atleast from what i can tell/see).
But the arena part is just a LOL fest. Allways the same people at the top (as it should be i guess). Last season we had some cool ativity top 10 in 2s. In 3s it was just power/peter trying to catch up in rating with the russians and the r1 rmp. And 5s was just dominated by non stupid players or crazy spellcleaves.
As for now, the 5s activity is reduced mainly to tuesday night (which is sad...) and its still dominated by the same people.
3s is just peter/power turtling vs every 1700 randoms and russians.
The 2s ladder is also just azie and co, chung, qzen, kaip, peter, power, gucci&the french squad, plus russians running around flaming each others. So there is still some activity, i guess (again) !