To me, profession nodes spawning only at a handful of static points has always felt a little broken, even back in 2005. It's too easily gamed + dominated.
What I'd like to see tried (or hell, maybe even try myself at some point) is doing away with static node spawns entirely. Instead, give the server an understanding of the game's maps so it can then dynamically choose truly random places on the map to spawn nodes. This could both fix the camping issue and make gathering a little less dull.
It should be technically feasible too. Servers already understand zone boundaries, so restricting dynamic spawn points of certain nodes to particular zones is simple. In the client, the game's maps are stored in the form of 2D height map images which the game creates 3D terrain from (dark = low, light = high), so it should be reasonably easy to make certain nodes spawn only on particular terrain profiles — for example, Earthroot would only spawn on slopes (areas in the height map with a steep dark -> light graduation), and other herbs might only appear at certain elevations. If you wanted to get super fancy you could even go as far as making nodes spawn only in close proximity to geographical features like trees (forest herbs) or other forms of dynamics (ore gets hard to come by if the local kobold population hasn't been kept under control and other crazy stuff).
There are tons of possibilities when it comes to gatherables, but for some reason private servers have explored and experimented with them less than any other part of the game. It's too bad because even within the confines of a pre-existing game there's so much that could be done to make gathering professions a more compelling and interesting than they are in Blizzard's implementation.
