I had a similar view of wow, not of all mmos, tho i fear mmos are trending to see who can copy wow the formula to the letter.
See my first mmo was ahserons call, back in the old school days of you know simple game mechanics, but ac had 100s of dungeons 95% of them all unique, yea at the start many of them were pretty pointless other than to explore them, but each month we got free updates that added new quests, new items, and most importaly told a story. story arc went in about 6 month increments where they would opne up one arc and tell the story over the course of the 6 to 8 months it ran, many arcs had epic quests that unfolded during the course of the arc, people that solved the epic quest arc first would get unique skinned rewards, so there was always fierce server competition to be first. BUt even the epics some of them had server broadcasts announcing to the server that you had beat x epic quest. Other event arcs had dev run characters, including the god of pvp who went around smiting carebears. And if you were good you got to talk to lord asheron form time to time when a dev played them if you muddled your way to the end stage first.
But the continuing story and deep lore and how the lore was woven into ac made me play it for 5 years, in which time i missed many games because i was playing ac, which conversely saved me alot of money since i was not spending 30 to 50 bucks on a game i would play a week or two then put on my shelf never to be glanced at again. and gaming nagazines had me running out spendng 100 bukcs or more a month on the must get games that month.
My experience with wow however was along the lines of get to max level and go ok wtf am i supposed to do now. Coupled with pladins being total asshats since they were the op class at the time and rollong on every item i needed as a warrior to be a halfway decent tank coupled with my complete crap rolls meant i had no gear at all "end game."
SO i quit, spurred on by a friend to play agian some year later or whatever i reluctantly, tried again, this time palandins were nerfed, now rogues were the op god class so all the asshats moved to that class so now i was not rolling against aholes for loot i needed so i was getting loot i needed. SO i got my blue set after a month or two of grinding noob instances, did a pug molten core run with a guild and they were impressed with my skills so they invited me to join them, and since my current guild was of the opinion that only their core players should be raiding and you had to sit and wait, i happily agreed.
SO my guild was a bunch of people that got wow was a game and people play games to have fun, so raid time our vent server was loud and filled with jokes, singing and general merriment while we did mc, bwl, etc, only calmed down when it came to boss time when we all did our jobs and killed boss x y and z got loot etc.
Loved my guild best bunch of people i ever played a game with really. But at some point of doing ony, mc, bwl, aq and the extreme grind of pvp and the ques that ok months of waiting to get in a pvp match. It got to the point the only reason to log into wow was to raid. I was done with the pvp (pre bc pvp where if you did not pvp 24 hours a day 7 days a week never eat never bathe and let your family friends children starve to death, or you could not get past rank 4 or whatever) so it was raiding.
But even with the best guild in the world, filled with a bunch of skrewballs that could raid with the beast raiding guilds in the game, it was like doing dungeon over and over and over and over to get gear to the raid the next dungeon, the whole end game was starting to feel more like a job than a gain oh is it monday, wednesday or friday and saturday raid day i better login and do ony for the 50th time, mc for the 30th time, bwl for the dozenth or so time and aq 40 we were just starting to work on etc but it all felt utterly pointless, and the game felt more like a job i was expected to do rather than a game i played for fun.
ANd if wow had any story ot lore to it they hid it well cause there seemed to be nothing in the quests, game or anything that told any kind of tale or layed out any kind of lore, and yes i am one of those that read the quests when i do them and wow was about as deep as go here do stuff then you got onde i that town go there do stuff. THen you got to end game it was go there kill something for loot. that was it. utterly pointless and hollow.