When I was young and got into WoW all I wanted was to play some game that I could sink a huge amount of time into, because I was tired of games that I'd spend a lot of time playing just to end up beating it and have all that time seem like it was wasted. (I was bored constantly because of school and just wanted something to help pass the time faster until I was done.) So when the ads for the first 10 day free trials of vanilla came out and I heard from my friend that it was a massive slow leveling game I gave it a try. I didn't really care about the online part I just liked the idea of the long grind. When I got more into it though the friendly online community became nearly my favorite thing about the game.
Blizzard just want to evolve their game and you can't blame them for that they think that releasing older versions will be just backward step.
I'm not going to argue that they should make an official vanilla server now, I think to a certain extent that ship has sailed. I want to argue that Blizzard has become totally short sighted in terms of keeping their business profitable into the distant future if they plan on making any more MMO's or keeping WoW profitable. I'd agree that it'd be a step backward the problem is that they are currently stepping towards the grave.
Everyone knows that retail WoW is mostly just young kids with too much free time playing now. While retail WoW has a knack for bring them in and making money off of them, what they seem to fail to realize is that they are working to make themselves obsolete. The main reasons those kids start to play the game in the first place are: 1. It's huge! You can play it for years and they'll still just come out with another expansion so you can keep playing even longer if you want. 2. Fantasy! You can choose to cast spells or swing a big axe. You can be a dwarf or even an orc. 3. It needs at least a small amount of lore/story. And that's about it. So, if kids who are just getting to that age could play an offline game that offered those three things but they didn't have to pay money every month they would choose that over WoW in a second, and so would many of those young kids who have been playing for a while and are already bored of it, and even more who were so antisocial that they never really felt comfortable playing an online game in the first place.
What I mean by saying that they are working to make themselves obsolete is that they are taking the great social aspect away from the game by making raids smaller and smaller and by making finding an instance as easy as pushing a button; And by pandering to antisocial young kids at every opportunity. Therefor, Blizzard is scaring away people who care about a good community in an MMO probably forever. So, if that offline game ever does come along they will have basically no loyal player base left, and WoW'll slowly dwindle; And unless they get into making offline games so will Blizzard probably.
Sorry to unleash this rant here, it's just a combination of wanting to do it anyway and seeing that smug ****t being so proud of such an easy, obvious and most of all stupid thing to implement.