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A great illustration of what is happening to WoW currently is what happened to Magic: the Gathering trading card game. I started playing it around 3rd Edition, and at that time, you could define a clear strategy when building a deck. You could customize your deck with "counter" spells depending on who you were playing against, knowing what colour they played, what their personality type was, and thus what cards they were likely to have. There was still plenty of room for surprise combos and situational strategic advantages, but there was usually a way to "block" your opponent intelligently if you were smart enough. When people were building 3rd and 4th Edition decks, they were not just thinking of counterspells - they were thinking of counter-counterspells.
I recently started dabbling in the game again since my son started playing it. It's now up to 9th Edition, and of course, all cards of all editions can be intermixed. The core rules of the game has not changed much, but there are so many "add-on" rule sets - a patchwork, as you called it - that there is no longer a way to create a strategy when building your deck. Instead, you just assemble a deck with some cards that you think may work well together, cross your fingers, and just hope to be lucky enough to draw the right cards at the right time. There's more "features", sure - but the overall strategic portion of the game has definitely deteriorated.
Similarly in WoW, as the number of talents and skills increase, it will get exponentially more difficult to plan a coherent strategy in PvP play. The end result will be the same as in M:tG - folks will pick 5-6 high-powered skills, unload them on everyone they see, and just hope their equipment is better than their opponent's.
Contrast that with Guild Wars, where individual skills are low-powered, but in combination with other skills become exponentially more powerful, and where it is still feasible to counter the skills of others - PvP battles tend to last longer without becoming boring, people adjust their strategies on the fly, and using your environment (player skills, rather than character stats) become a necessity for survival. As long as GW can stay away from run-amok mudflation of skills, they will have a stronger endgame than WoW - however high Blizzard raises the level cap and max size of raid parties.