We're never going to agree. I think the compactness of MoP is actually a good thing. A lot of zones...the vanilla zones especially were big wide fields of nothing. How much of the real estate in Silithus was actually used for anything? Well, the Cenarion Hold. And the gates that lead into AQ were for that world event. That's basically it. Red Ridge? Wetlands? The Searing Gorge, Deadwind Pass, the Swamp of Sorrows. The list goes on forever.

A lot of old zones are big but devoid of anything actually engaging. Or, hell, even fun to look at. A big world is not an interesting one.

But most of the MoP zones use their space much more effectively. The longest stretch of road in Kun-lai is for that escort quest and yeti daily. The tallest mountains have unique catchable minipets and things to click on to read. There are tunnels that go into and under some of the mountains into icy caves or Mogu crypts. Some of the biggest blank spots in the zones are actually spawn points for Sha of Anger; giving them purpose.

The level design is just better. Yeah, okay, you can cross the landmass as a whole in a small handful of minutes but would the game really be better if it simply took twice as long to go from one coast to the other?

They CAN make the ground floor of Draenor interesting. But they won't. I've seen their attempts to make completely flightless areas interesting. Go run around the Thunder Isle for ten minutes. The place is covered in mobs to the point that trying to navigate it without getting a bunch of aggro from everything is like running through a mine field. That alone isn't a problem but there are two issues here.

1) It doesn't age well. Now that the isle is not current the whole place is a clusterfuck to navigate because it was designed with a population in mind that no longer exists. This same issue will plague most / all of Draenor if we stay grounded there all expansion once the initial population thins. Suddenly the "We're encouraged to work together!" thing falls apart because there aren't as many people to team up with around you but the exact same mob density exists. Which leads directly into the other problem...

2) Everything on the isle is now seen as an obstacle. When you don't need the rep anymore or want to do the dailies you just start to view everything as an obstruction between you and wherever it is you're going. This isn't player entitlement or whatever-the-balls either. This is a part of character progression. This is why you roll your eyes when you're playing a single player game and you get into a random encounter with level 10 mobs while your hero is level 75. It's not engaging -- it's just there to waste your damn time.

Flight was added in the first place to give players a freedom of movement and to reach areas like the small islands in Netherstorm or the daily hubs for the Skyguard and the Netherdrakes. There was a point at which flight was actually used to grant players the ability to explore the world around them on a deeper level -- not just mindlessly skip over stuff. We still see flight used in quests and stuff sometimes too; like the sky race event at the Cloud Serpent Riders hub. Flight was supposed to add to the game and give you more options. That's how it was billed to us when TBC was coming out, you know? But somewhere between then and now flight just became associated with skipping everything.

Why?

Flight is just another game design tool that can be used well or used poorly. What we're seeing is that Blizzard either doesn't know how to use it well anymore or just doesn't give enough of a shit to try to use it in a compelling fashion.