retail quest markers are so aggressively precise that it’s hard to not figure it out.
classic questing was hard by comparison.
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Now that’s very funny. lol
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Umm, I think you have it backwards. This was exactly how vanilla questing was. Now it’s super straight-forward and simple:
Go to hub. Do two (sometimes three) quests, one involving killing, one involving collecting. Turn in quests. Go out and kill more stuff. Turn that quest in. Go out and kill single named quest mob. Get part of an achievement so you know you’re done and then move on.
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Nothing about WoW’s questing in my opinion is complicated currently. We still have much the same situation going on now in a lot of ways. Some of them are a bit more involved, but for the most part, it’s “Here are four quests. These four quests are all in the same space. Go perform these four quests and then come back here and turn them all in at once. Okay, now move on to the next spot and do it again”.
I dunno. Nothing about questing right now feels too complicated.
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Oh no, god forbid you actually have to sink more than 5 minutes into a quest. Boo hoo
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just look at this mess LOL
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this is “planet mining” in EVE. aka Planet industry.
Oh really? Well I’ll tell you this. Youngsters these days don’t know how good the old days were. Why I remember riding on my mule 6 miles to buy my first copy of Wow at the general store, by golly. Why that same evening I remember climbing into a one horse open sleigh with my friends.
And then we went:
Dashing through the snow
In a one-horse open sleigh
O’er the fields we’d go
Laughing all the way
Bells on bobtails rang
Making spirits bright
Oh what fun it was to ride in a one horse open sleigh.
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I’m currently thinking about how I played a Draenei hunter in TBC classic just recently and I got a quest in Darkshore and it sent me all the way to Menethil Harbor just to talk to a guy.
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why is renown so little
All I gotta say is Green Hills of Stranglethorn.
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This is not at all how WoW quests were “back in the day”. In the actual “back in the day” (by which I mean vanilla) quests sent you all over the place, sometimes to far flung zones, and you had to do escorts and dungeons and get low drop rate quest items from dungeon bosses. Quests were scattered all over the place in little corners and from NPCs sitting alone in the middle of the woods and from items that dropped from mobs. There were even quests you could only see and pick up WHILE YOU WERE DEAD. While on the topic, the hunter epic bow and priest epic staff quest lines from Molten Core say “hi”.
The quest style you describe, which I dislike, started in Cata. Never travel out of zone or even to another part of the current zone. Quest mobs/items were sometimes even in visual distance of the quest giver. Quests are clumped up into tight hubs which you go from one to the next like a park ride on rails with no side paths to explore and nothing to think about.
I wouldn’t even say it’s in the past few expansions (note plural) that it’s begun to change back a little. Even BfA had a very repetitive pattern of breadcrumb quest to two quest givers who give you three quests then two quests… three quests, then two quests… The only change up in BfA was that you could do them some out of order and skip some as long as you weren’t skipping main story quests. Shadowlands expanded on that a little bit with lots of little side quests and only the main story chain was required, but even that only required ONCE. If you wanted to skip the main story on alts, you could.
As someone who liked the questing better in the REAL “back in the day”, I like the slight return to more organic feeling, more adventuring feeling questing.
I love you for this chart. 
It’s all true. I do not miss attunement chains and hope those don’t come back.
It’s more straightforward than vanilla now. (I can’t see the game ever truly returning to vanilla style questing and am not recommending it should.) But it is much more complicated than it was from Cata through BfA. (With Legion and BfA where the change started to happen a tiny bit which led into what we had in Shadowlands.) My guess is OP started playing in Cata or later.
OMG. I love your amazingly accurate example. I will illustrate it with emojis of the emotions involved:
Loot 8 carrots.
OK. Kill Rabbit. Got… fur.
Kill rabbit… got… eyeball.
Kill rabbit. No loot.
Kill rabbit. … a rusty knife? How is that even inside a ra… look, never mind.
Kill rabbit. A copper coin.
Kill rabbit. ANOTHER knife? Are they eating knives? Wheres the carrots?
26 kills later. One partially eaten carrot. Does not count for the quest.
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WoW has always had these stupidly long and irritating quest systems. Recently they have gotten worse. If a quest goes into a quest chain. And I have to follow it for several hours, and realize that it’s gonna take days. I just stop doing that quest. I don’t care. I will just stop and do something else.
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Your issue OP is you want to finish the campaign in 1-2 days
The long-ish campaign is designed to take time
So take time, play it out, and spread the enjoyment out. This is how the game is meant to be played
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It’s good to see you again. 
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Back in the days of your friend telling you “I read on thottbot there’s a quest 8 zones over we haven’t done yet, we should run over there.” And on the way you came across a treasure chest that contained Sungrass, a Healing Potion, and some Dalaran Sharp.
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questing in 2022 is quite lame honestly idc how they do them why you think so many people dungeon level cause its more fun. don’t be surprised if things go all whacko before its over there is literally no old squad left besides ion and most these devs they got probably never played an mmo.
I’m gonna go with memory loss,
I mean… Did you do Linkens adventure?
Or get Rhok’Delar, or Benediction? Or even quest post level 40 during vanilla?
Did you do any of the attunement quests in BC?
They send you all over the place.
You clearly did not do Loremaster back in the day circa Wrath. There were quest that literally send you to the other side of the world.
Most quest in DF are relatively self contained. There are probably less then a dozen that require you to leave the zone.
There’s a lot of quest chains in Vanilla that have you bouncing from Tanaris to the Hinterlands to Booty Bay to Darnassus etc. And it ain’t super easy getting around. I mind that sort of thing much more than a quest with a few steps.
And they know they can’t just make every last quest a kill/collect, even though that’s still the majority of them. Trying to strike the balance of familiar and innovative seems tricky for a quest designer. It went overboard in WotlK (way too many gimmicky vehicle quests).