Retail actively interferes with immersion and the feeling of being a person on an adventure thru spells that just pop on your action bar, pop-ups, quests that just appear and are paid out of thin air, quests that you can’t refuse, ect, so, no, it isn’t like WoW is some pretty World full of quests you can just adventure across in an immersed headspace.
And Warbands has just made that worse.
I head canon as much stuff away as I can but even my very active and creative imagination only stretches so far.
I don’t level so that is not a factor.
Questing in retail is now on-rails (although I just finished Azure Span and, oddly, it was much better in that respect) and, instead of being zone progression, is now just the same fight over and over and over again.
So yes, both from the perspective of immersion and gameplay, questing is worse in retail.
And when you add in all the examples I gave above of immersion-breaking features, yeah, questing is a much worse experience in retail.