50% of the dps in raids are warriors, and same in battlegrounds.
Was the dps warrior meta not obvious in vanilla?
Because “meta” wasn’t a common word during Vanilla.
All the warriors weren’t logging just to stack worldbuff, only a niche of players were doing this.
You can check it here : https://www.method.gg/raid-history
Rogue/hunter sometime even SP priest were top DPS.
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I think it was always one of the most-played classes.
From a player’s point of view it was obviously a cool class and a strong class, but players didn’t seem to cling to meta-game paradigms quite so dogmatically back then. Most of us were just playing what looked cool or what sounded fun from the intro on the character-creation screen.
From a dev’s point of view, I think they saw Warrior as one of the classes that they “got right”, as opposed to classes like Druid and Paladin that they were continuing to work on and trying to define and balance throughout Vanilla and beyond. I think they would have liked to get all classes to that point where each spec has a viable defined role, identity, and strengths.
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Players are significantly more skilled and knowledgeable about the game now compared to back then. Believe it or not Warriors were considered the most underpowered class back then. No one knew how powerful they truly were.
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They added the current warrior meta with aq. Which is why this version of “vanilla” is kinda a scam. Original vanilla did not have fury dps till then.
All that fury dps was not a thing prior to aq. Its why people dislike the patch they chose or that they did not stick to the original schedule.
Just live with it
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There weren’t enough warriors, to be honest. You usually had 4-5 in your raid group and they all were forced to MT or offtank.
Warriors didn’t have a viable fury spec before Zul Gurub.
They didn’t really have a good protection spec either. Arms/Prot was actually the most viable main tank spec, only offtanks would actually go full prot.
I don’t believe the developers anticipated how talents like Flurry and mechanics like Rage would scale with really high critical strike chance. There’s no way they expected fully buffed and consumed Warriors to be running around with a forty or more percent chance to crit. Remove world buffs and Warrior damage is still high but quickly returns back to earth and is more in line with other classes.
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Im just pointing out that fury wars in this idiotic dps form (which btw is part of why the content is so piss easy as well) did not exist pre aq.
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And I’m agreeing with you and adding the interesting fact that your two main tanks pretty much had to be arms/prot.
Raiding was too different as a whole for us to make adequate predictions of how it would have gone with full patch progression.
Warriors had one good spec. Arms.
They could to Arms/fury for some dps, but it was suboptimal or, as tended to be the case, arms/prot for tanking.
Only offtanks actually went full prot.
Full fury wasn’t a thing.
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Most people weren’t as obsessed with class balance as they are now. Class stacking was seen as something that only the 1% did, you didn’t have every man and his dog enforcing a “meta”.
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What would even be the point or stacking warriors before Zul Gurub? They didn’t even have a viable fury spec.
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We’re also playing on 1.12’s patch, which was basically, “finished” vanilla. Warriors had already been reworked (along with the other classes, notably Hunter DPS nerfs) and Fury had already been buffed. We also have far, far more knowledge and mastery and know how to gear properly - aiming for specific, high value pieces like Truestrike whereas in vanilla you’d largely see Warriors using a random plate Strength piece because they didn’t know better.
Also given players were vastly different back then, along with the skill and knowledge gap, leveling was a huge undertaking whereas now it’s not hard to have multiple 60s.
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Ok, well maybe I should be asking “why didn’t they fix warrior dps in 1.12” 
Well firstly, they already fixed Warrior DPS prior to 1.12. And second, there still weren’t that many people playing to the point it was even noticeable. Even in TBC we still had a very large majority of players playing suboptimally. Meta has only really been a consideration to the average player in more recent years.
Sadly, the meta discussion is from private servers. They are the ones who came up with the meta that we see now, based on the most efficient and strongest compositions. And that’s what a lot of people stuck with.
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I did not raid during vanilla… so question: Were warriors using rogue leather over plate back then?
Thank you for the link, that is very interesting. There’s a mix of mages, hunters, rogues, and warriors on the Naxxramas boss fights. The notes say that Naxxramas was released with 1.11, which is before 1.12.
Not that many. There were some, but pretty much everyone stuck with what their armour class was other than healers. There were definite exceptions but the knowledge just wasn’t there about how useful hit was, or how valuable 1% of crit was compared to AP, etc. Pretty much everything was hidden and we didn’t know for a long time.
I mean, in world first boss kills, there were still clickers and keyboard turners.
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That’s what I suspected. The BiS recommendations online for all melee classes seem to include mostly leather.
Weren’t most people gunning for their class-specific armor sets back then? Seems to me doing so would up the challenge a bit, hence the lack of consistency between the challenge level then vs. now.