Agreed.
However, as to the rest of your post, feeling like it wasn’t an accomplishment… nah, what you describe is similar to my pre-nerf no cheese experience - grinding like a madman until I got it done. It felt good to get it done.
Do I mind that they nerfed it so others could achieve it? Not really, because it was really, really hard when I did it, seemingly impossible for a lot of players. The number of annihilates I had to survive to beat the DPS without using exploits or cheesy timewalking gear in retrospect was completely absurd and most people would just not get that kind of amazing run.
It seems like it is in a fine state now. Hard but doable.
In fact, before I killed it, here was my opinion of it - Getting Older Sucks (WoW, Mage Tower, and "Gamer Stamina")
No idea. But in DAOC it was all black dyes and red lightsabers (there was a sword that looked like a red lightsaber which was very novel as most weapons in DAOC just looked like regular weapons).