Just leaving this idea here to perhaps plant in the mind of a developer who might read this.
So far I like the flavor of Classic Era/Hardcore the most right now, but there are still two major things I don’t like about the leveling race/process–dungeons are mostly ignored, and grinding mobs between quests can be excessive sometimes (naga cave for alliance, azshara elves for horde, etc.)
I think improving these two issues in the form of a future season would be nice. For the dungeon issue, some huge incentive could be implemented to complete each and every dungeon at least once while leveling. Maybe you get a big persistent buff (damage? XP? other?) for completing a dungeon for the first time. Or you are rewarded a special enchantment consumable that you can apply to your weapons that would massively increase your throughput in the next questing areas. Sure there are a lot of dungeon quests already that reward nice blue weapons, but that still isn’t a big enough incentive to do in a race setting for example. A small segway from this would also be to implement solo mode for dungeons. I imagine this would be a feat to balance correctly, but this would ensure SSF players could still see dungeon scenery.
For the grinding issue, this was solved before in SoM. The increased quest XP essentially eliminated the need to grind between quests, which felt insanely good.
I think both of these changes for a future season would shake up the leveling meta quite a bit while retaining the fun factor and without #changing or adding too much new content.