Among many here I've certainly enjoyed the atmosphere, setup and overall play of the expansion. IMO far better in all ways than BC was in content/mechanics. However, I do have one little gripe.

In BC (As vanilla content.) trade vendors often had limited stock items of some interest. Most were for professions, and ranged from the necassary to the cosmetic. In Wrath, every single hub has the same vendor content. Virtually no variation and I found it rather sterile. When I stumbled across such things previously, it was great for my main, alt, a guildie or plain ol' AH fodder. I found it fun.

I do realize that this was likely done just to stop people from camping and either making huge money AHing these items, or to stop the QQ from people who could never manage to be at the right vendor at the right time. Still, I think that would've been minor compared to finding a new area and ignoring everyone/thing there that didn't have a bright yellow ! over it's head. Meh, I guess I'm an RPer at heart.

That and I miss treasure chests. I recall BC didn't have SFA for them when released, but little things like that are something I enjoy as perks of exploring.

For the most part the spreading out of recipes was a fairly random, and pointless, inconvenience. Splitting up where one goes to make one's specialized cloth is a neat touch of flavor. Distributing recipes for pieces in a set to random vendors made much less sense. Effectively, if there's no flavor beyond the hassle itself there's no point.

There were chests in BC (I don't know what you mean by SFA), they were simply tuned down in terms of rewards. You'd get a few scraps of food and some random trade goods most of the time. Blizzard decided that instead of chests it was better to make more interesting rare spawns, potentially ones which required a group.

What I meant about the dearth of chests was when BC first opened, IIRC they had neither the number of chests they eventually placed, as well they were using a preBC loot table.

As for not making as much sense, well I see your point but an uneven distribution of commerce is what "trade" is all about. ie) If everything you ever needed was at the local market, why would you go shopping in Europe?

Actually, up until fast mechanical shipping became widely available with the railroads, "everything you need is at the local market" was in fact the case.

And while going to Europe to shop would certainly be nice, if one has to go there to acquire something useful it's rather a pain, isn't it? Useless flavor items like pets are fine to distribute widely geographically, but needed or useful patterns should not be only available from random vendor A in the middle of freaking nowhere. For example, at a certain point in enchanting the cheapest way to level is via a recipe sold only in Silithus. Especially for Alliance this is a long and annoying run for no real reason.

Edit: spelling

No special patterns at the vendors is on the one hand certainly more convenient but it does take a little bit from the exploration aspect of the game away. As so many things in MMO design, this a balancing decision between variety and streamlining, depth and ease of access. I personally miss the the special patterns from vendors, but good riddance to chests, as they never conatained anything exciting anyway.

Sometime mentioned they upped the drops from rare mobs. What do they drop now? Anything better than random greens (I only encountered Dirkee so far and was almost insta killed by him as I somehow missed his elite status *cough*). Rare Mobs with really desirable drops like epics, patterns and flavor items would be great, as I think spawn hunting of valuable mobs is something that is really missing in WoW.

I believe it's one random enchant blue, about 20g, and a stack of Frostweave. One specific rare drops a mount ([Reins of the Time-Lost Proto-Drake]).