I'm one of the most forgiving customers there is,

[savaughn]

I recently did something that I never thought I would do.  I turned off guild chat (but it is back on now).  The chat had turned to what equipment was "uber", how terrible it was that certain items had been nerfed and how each class would be working toward a specific item sets.  Being used to all the items and modifiers in Diablo 1&2, I expected there to be a wide range of "best" equipment.  In the Diablos, the modifiers each came with a range.  Even if you had an ob/zob in Diablo, you could still hunt for the elusive perfect ob/zod.
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We haven't even seen the higher level of equipment yet. You're speculating on "final builds" when everything that's currently in the game is going to be dwarfed by two additional rarity levels. I hardly think that what may or may not be the "best" set up in the game right now is in any way indicitive of what Blizz is pushing for end game equipment. We haven't seen any of the end game equipment, with the possible exception of the Officer sets in the battlegrounds preview.

I certainly don't see players going on skill alone such as a naked mage in Diablo.
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Apples and oranges. If WoW had so little content that 3-4 months after you had gotten it you were doing Stupid Gaming Tricks™ to keep yourself interested in the game, I would be sad. In that timeline, you're completely done with the game at month 6. I played Doom for two and a half years before I got around to seeing how far I could get in the game just punching things. Irene the Infirm was what... 3 years after the D2 release?

My experience? The absolute opposite. WoW is AMAZINGLY rich in content. All of the classes play completely differently! Playing through the game as a Night Elf is a whole different thing than playing through as a Human/Dwarf/Gnome. Horde vs. Alliance is a night and day difference with rich content waiting all over the place.

I haven't gotten through all of the PREPARED content yet. It's going to be months or years before I have to start trying to play with player set limitations to keep the game interesting. And it looks like Blizz is going to have substantial content additions every six months! With that in play I may never actually get through all the prepared content. (not for lack of trying!)

Solo/Casual Play
Before getting into the game, I often saw it said that it would appeal to the casual gamer as much as the hard core player.  I don't see it as being for the casual gamer at all.  If you are soloing, it is not convenient to go AFK or logout in the middle of a quest.
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OK, this really gets me. This game is brilliant for casual and/or solo play. If you need to, you can generally log out in a safe location within 20 seconds of needing to. You can always hearth. By comparison, most games lock you in for 20 minutes at a time. What's more, they go out of their way to identify long content as instances and elite quests, etc. You're right though. If you want a game you can stand up and walk away from at any second without having any inconvenience, this isn't it.

I don't think I've ever played that game. I don't want to play that game. I think few people would. But then, that's not material for the casual gamer, is it? Even casual gamers want a game more interesting than one they can walk away from at any time.

Once you get to level cap, there is almost nothing (other than tedious rep grinding) that can be done solo.  You are forced into instances and need to party or raid to get through them.
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Allow me to suggest that if you ever get to the level cap, you aren't a casual gamer. In fact, if you got to the level cap already, you are, in point of fact, a hard core gamer who's put in a staggering number of hours in the game. For these people, yes, Blizz expects you to group to continue exploring the level appropriate content.

Server Stability
As is being said by many others, this is what has the greatest potential to push me away.  The server problems make no sense to me.  There are attempts by some of the community to shift the blame to Blizzard's ASP.  That just doesn't "feel" right to me.  I see this more as a bad use of the beta test period.  It seems to me that they had far too many people testing the majority of the content, assuming this would stress the servers.  The best way to have done it, IMHO, would have been to have the content very limited, with a large number of players.  This would have forced high concentrations such as we see in Ironforge or during large raids.  They should have tested the server software in this way until it was rock solid.  Once they determined what population could be supported without incident, they then should have cut that number in half to allow for unforeseen problems and used that to set server caps.  The server software is just that.  It is not streaming the video or sound to us.  It is passing packets of information indicating who is doing what where.  It should be able to pass the information back and forth reliably.  Once it was capable of passing more than enough info, only then should they have worried about all the fun stuff we see on our end such as artwork and sounds and game play.
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Maybe it's the fact that I work in a similar kind of environment, but some of the assumptions in here kind of get my back up. Sorry if it comes across as a result, but think about what you're saying here. "used that to set server caps"? How? Player queues? They did that, you hate them. Limiting how many people can be on what servers? Would you really like it if half the lurkers got onto Stormrage and they cut it off so no one else could join the server? Oh, here's an idea... they could estimate how many copies of the game they'll sell, and scale the front end and back end servers appropriately. Oh wait, they did. And they sold many many times the estimated number of copies of the game and on top of that all the players want to play on the same servers, meaning that half the servers are starved for people and the other half are just crushed with players.

The business logic in WoW is not trivial. The database access is unbelievably complex. The game sold out every copy Blizz had printed for the first nine months of the games release by Christmas. Blizz did something that no other gaming company would do - they actually refused to sell more copies until they had put more servers out there so the game would still play really well. And then when they started selling copies again, no one used the new servers and everyone continued to crush onto the same high pop boxes.

The fact of the matter is that I'm amazed the game is as playable as it is. These servers are sustaining hundreds of thousands of players with enough database persistence that "rollback" is generally only a couple of seconds. That's impressive. Sure, once a week I'll have lag or login issues with a given server. That's why I play on a couple different ones.