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What I am wondering: was there ever a "real vision" behind WoW, apart from a specific cartoony art style, the time and place (Azeroth after the WCIII expansions), and the concept of the game as a more streamlined, more fun EQ ("EQ-lite", some critics have called it) with a fantasy version of counterstrike thrown in as an effectively separate minigame ("consensual PvP")?

I mean, one of the strengths of Blizzard, so people say, is that they are hardly original but fine-tune and polish pre-existing concepts from earlier games (whether their own or somebody else's). Aren't WoW's weaknesses then the result of those earlier games' fundamental weaknesses (static world, ultimately meaningless PvP done for the heck of it).
After all, I have the impression they did not really look at and study, let alone copy and fine-tune the more unique elements of games like DAoC or Shadowbane or even some single-player RPG's.

Long ago, I played Warcraft II for quite some time. I smelled at Starcraft and Warcraft III, but never bought them. They were simply too much, including their fundamental weaknesses, like Warcraft II; they felt very, very similar, only more polished and prettified. Diablo I en II never made it either, because I had played Crusader, the game Diablo I borrowed heavily from. I am increasingly certain that if I had played Everquest (WoW is my first "real" mmorpg after sniffing at Saga of Ryzom and EQII), I would probably never have fallen for WoW. Too much the same, if smoother and nicer. I am a sucker for games that offer at least some innovations that improve the overall experience; it does not have to be much, but in my experience Blizzard does not even do that. They are slick, they are good at it, but frankly, looking hard at my past experiences with their games, they don't innovate on any scale.
And with such a background, how could they ever come up with a vision that deals with the real fundamental flaws of a game like Everquest? The time sinks, the boredom, the crappy presentation...all these things can be overcome with sufficient polish, tweaking etc. That is something where Blizzard's strength lie. But overcoming the problems of level cap and endgame? That would have required real creative thinking, a good look at various games, both mmo's and single player games, stealing the best ideas and combine them into something new. Heck, they could have looked at the entire fantasy / strategy game scene; for instance, long ago AD&D experimented with the combination of roleplaying and strategy/kingdom management. A few years ago, German company Phenomic created a real CRPG/RTS hybrid, Spellforce, that was fairly successful. Looking at smaller innovations, Ascaron's Sacred actually introduced mounted combat. And great fun that it was too!

I don't have much knowledge of the MMO market, save what I have been reading these last couple of months, after the first addiction to WoW faded. But I can't help feeling that WoW will remain caught in the "EQ-rut", and that this would have been the case even if nobody at Blizzard had left. They strike me as a company that is institutionally incapable of the innovations needed to really evolve the genre (fantasy mmorpg's), or for that matter, any genre. All those people who have left Blizzard (or forced to leave)? I suspect they may be the lucky ones, for now they are in the position to do things that, ultimately, may be more satisfying from the creative point of view.

In the meantime, WoW is and will remain for some time the "best" generic fantasy mmorpg, certainly for total newbies. Until a new contender comes along, or better still, several, who will share WoW's current market among themselves. That will happen sooner or later, but given the length of production cycles that will be a long way off - 2008 or something, which may roughly coincide with an acceleration of the inevitable decline of the game's popularity.