Your mistaken on a few things.
1. It did not happen in retail. Sorry. I played since Beta, my age is showing. You could simply move to another zone, log back in and the griefer would go away. Also GMs would step in at certain points and say enough is enough, move on. Why? I am paying to play (unlike here) and if I am not having fun I stop paying. Thats not the case here. Here, as I have said, you move zones, you still get killed. Just another group.
Someone said we are looking for a solo experience. No were not. You cannot group up a team of 5 in the 20s, 30s, 40s and defeat a 60. Resist, Resist, Resist, blah blah blah. Oh and if you get a team in the 50s well they get 2 60s and your back to dead over and over.
You said removing .join would not work. 100%? no the only thing that 100% would work is making it a PVE server and poof, its impossible to be ganked. But it might, hence progressive hypothesis testing, do enough that it vastly limits it.
No they do not. They accept that they could be killed. No one accepts nor desires that to occur for 2 hours straight, zone after zone. That behavior is being allowed my the GMs. The only acceptance you can sight is when the player is dumb enough to login. But we did that on retail and we got changes as well.
Point of fact the game sucks right now.
I started playing a few weeks after realease. It did happen, though (as I said) on a much smaller scale. The population cap/spread (as a result of server stability issues) meant there were fewer people to doing all of the the same things that people are doing now (leveling, griefing, dungeons, raids, profs, etc). Also, the world and dungeon and raid encounters weren't so familiar, so people spent more time doing pretty much everything PvE related.
I remember being "camped" meant being able to get away after +/- 2 deaths--and other level 60's would often come and kill the campers. In fact, the reason for killing in lowbie zones was often to draw out other 60's. I also remember moving to a different part of the zone (not even to another zone) would often solve the problem. But, about a year after release, there were at least four Alliance guilds on my server (Kil'Jaeden US) that would regularly raid XR, be at the gates at Org, patrol Felwood, wall-camp at Cenarion Hold, etc. And I'm sure there were Horde players doing it, too. These people existed then, but there weren't so many per server. (I also remember when they made flight masters tougher and gave them adds--an example of the devs' attempt to alleviate the issue.)
I hate when people say "play a single-player game then". As if that's what anyone's after in this game. As if people must interact with others 100% of the time in order to enjoy the game. It's like saying the server is "ded" if nobody's said anything in /world for 30 secs.
If people didn't accept this as part of the game, they wouldn't play. It really is as simple as that. But literally thousands are still playing through it and finding ways to enjoy it. Using my experience as an example again: I "accepted" competing for quest mobs and items for several hours, then went and found a server where I didn't have to do that. It wasn't so important to me to keep playing here (or other places) that I needed to "accept" that as part of the game. You make a very valid point about paying to play, but you're not locked in here--you're more than welcome to find a PvE realm that works for you.
And to add to that--why haven't you found a PvE realm that works for you? Why are you still playing here (assuming you are) and accepting this as part of the game? And, if converting to PvE and stopping the ganking/griefing (even if only to level 50) would make so many players happy, why aren't PvE realms more popular in the pserver scene?