PVP RANKS - No proof of skill

[Lighthammer]

Most of vanilla is about having enough time, not skill. You can be the most awesome PvPer on the server, but if you can't do premades 24/7 you'll never get to r14. Similarly with raids, vanilla has the most easy raid content of all expansions, you just need enough time to do them. Questing and grinding XP is not particularly difficult either, just takes a while.
When WoW was released it was a huge transition towards less grindy and less time-consuming gameplay, but compared to more modern MMOs it's still very bad.