It’s honestly nice to see another “Vanilla” fan with this perspective, although after all our conversations I’m not surprised that we see eye to eye on this.
It’s interesting because around a month ago I was talking to this person from my Vanilla server and he randomly stated the same sort of thing about the sharding/CRZs killing the “village feeling” in his words. He was trying to find people to play Retail with to get the old server community feel back. I felt bad for him.
Yes, the transfers caused most of the problems. I think that Blizzard has been trying to make things as hands off for themselves as possible but as for discovering why things have gone the way they have, they haven’t bothered to delve very deeply.