To me, much better question is if there really was such a thing as "Vanila WoW brilliance" ... We were young, naive, and much more forgiving than we are now ... there was lots of things Vanila WoW did wrong ... but we dont even remember those ... what we remember is good stuff, packed with memories that cant be repeated, and lots of nostalgia.
Point is: No game is ever as good as your beloved classic ... not even that beloved classic itself.
I mean, I played Vanilla WoW on a private EU server not less than a few years ago and I had a blast. In fact I have played through 3 iterations of private servers on Light's Hope, and later Elysium. I was reminded of how absolutely brilliant - although flawed of course - the original was.
The biggest problem with the original software is that it had a hard time keeping up with all the ways people learned to cheat later and the software that enabled it. You really do need an active GM community or a smart AI that can keep tabs on all that.
Even Classic WoW was pretty solid, although I disagree with them making encounters and the world itself less difficult. It was still a lot of fun.
Even now there is a significant community that still plays on private servers - 20 years after that game released. The Graphics are still very good.
