TBC to me was peak WoW quality if you’re a PvPer because they made PvP more than just a casual aspect of the game with arenas and because of this new feature this meant balancing adjustments for it specifically. I think the reason PvP was the most balanced in BC was because this was a new focused feature in the expansion so they wanted to make sure it was good quality. I think to testify flying as a huge negative impact on PvP is a bit of a fallacious argument. It was a limited feature, if you didn’t like people just flying over everything like they do now in modern you could just go back to Azeroth where flying was completely disabled still.
I think that’s most people saying classic is better tbh. TBC wasn’t that drastically different, the same formula was retained up until the end of Wrath. Cataclysm should’ve been the point where they decided to make a WoW 2 as its own separate game. I also don’t get the logic from casual PvPers saying that the introduction of the competitive scene harmed casual PvP content.
Whether I’m able to do arenas or not isn’t gonna change how much I desire to do world PvP, the only thing it changes is what I’m gonna do instead of world PvP when I don’t want to do it. But if people would rather be doing arenas instead of world PvP how is forcing them to participate in another type of PvP because it’s the only option going to increase their enjoyment of it?