I think this is a good way of putting it - and it’s again why I disagree with the idea that the Alliance can do whatever they want and still be justified. A Night Elf can get into that mindset, but it doesn’t make them right. The key I think is - we have to demonstrate to the player why that’s true.
So, let me take a crack at it:
Let’s say we revamp Ashenvale and the Barrens. In Ashenvale, I get the big juicy win that I’ve been wanting, albeit in the no-holds barred sort of way. Meanwhile, in the barrens, Horde players through their questing are introduced to an old Warsong clan member. He didn’t drink the demon blood, he barely tolerated Garrosh. He was considered to be more valuable as a farmer than a soldier during the Fourth War, and he has a wife and two grown children. They give various quests, the son and the daughter help you kill quillboar. Both of them seem really eager to be just like their father.
Some of the later barrens quests involve the player having to respond to rumors and distress calls from outlying settlements. The Ashenvale questing that I talked about has concluded, and at night, Sentinel raiding parties are sneaking into the Barrens - avoiding combat with garrisons and well armed troops, and instead, deliberately going after homesteads and villages, often putting them to the torch to make a point. The Warsong Clan, decimated from its previous conflicts, is trying to put a stop to these raids, but they can’t protect their garrisons and stop all border crossings at the same time. They’re also need a proper leader.
One of these quests has you defending a village from one of these raids. That Orc-farmer and his son and daughter are there trying to defend it. You’re successful, but the Orc farmer’s children are both shot by a sentinel with distinctive silver armor - and she retreats from the burning village with some of her huntresses. We learn that this sentinel has been planning and leading many of these attacks.
The farmer returns to his home and informs his wife. He reminds us here that he never wanted any part of this. That he did nothing wrong, that he didn’t do this to them, that he didn’t burn their tree - and we leave him to resentfully weep over his loss.
A few quests later, we see him arrive at the Warsong Garrison, ready to do his part to repel the invaders. He’s involved in a questline where the Silver Sentinel tries a larger raid into the Barrens. This time she’s planning on striking deep to hit the Crossroads per the plans that you find on one of her dead comrades. By now, due to the sentinel practice of targeting whoever appears to be in charge, our farmer leads a pack of worg riders. He, and you mount them and dash across the barren plains at the head of a Warsong war party in a race to stop the sentinel and her huntresses from executing her plan. You do - the fight is an exciting mounted one where you have to dodge arrows, and use a ragtag combination of guns, spears, spells and bows to defeat the huntresses - who begin to scatter in different directions to draw off some of the warsong pursuers. You’re left with the farmer, and the Silver Sentinel. She shoots the farmer’s worg out from under him, and while the farmer lives, this allows her to get away. Nevertheless, you stopped the raid and this is regarded as a great success.
The Farmer, now a Warsong Commander is the one who now leads Warsong Forces in Warsong Gulch. The Silver Sentinel is his Alliance counterpart.
Now, I’m not a writer, so everything may not have come across well, but the general point of this exercise was to make the conflict personal, and to frame the Alliance as the bad guys in it by presenting relatable Horde representatives, and putting them in conflict with less scrupulous Alliance counterparts. The idea was to make it obvious: why would the Orcs continue to fight the Night Elves? I feel that it’s easier to do that from the ground than it would be to try to put things in the scale of a city-burning genocide. This also would support carrying on that conflict in the PVP battleground, presumably with future content involving those characters to give a little bit more background to the battleground.
More to the point - unless I really screwed things up here, I don’t think anyone would look at the story of that farmer and conclude that he or his family deserved what happened to them because they were Orcs, which is the point.