I'll check it out for you SD !!
I reactivated a few days ago and honestly I'm pretty excited about Cataclysm. I'm completely on the other side of the fence that it is less of an expansion because they're more remodeling and redoing than creating completely new areas. I don't know about you guys, but the main reason I don't like leveling new characters of classes I tend to prefer is that _I fucking hate leveling through the new areas Blizz has created the last two expansions_. Outside of a handful of really amazing zones like Zangarmarsh and Sholoazar it is just a pain in the ass and none of the 6-7 zones they make an expansion really see any light after you finish leveling. There is a huge amount of people who make (probably untrue) claims that the game's best days were in vanilla, and while I think those are exaggerated there's a certain love that the original continents got that I'm not sure Outland and Northrend got in their rush to be exciting and ridiculous rather than just immersive. Going back to the old areas should be good for the lore, which has quite frankly just gotten ridiculous as time has gone on, and Blizz's focus here seems to be in investing time and energy into things people will actually be doing at max level rather than getting there, which sure makes a hell of a lot more sense to me.
The new races only partially interest me(if I end up going back to Alliance, which we've bounced around, I might go Worgen), but I'm really, really interested in how good the new racials are. They've said they are redoing all the racials to make it up to the bar the newbies have set and with the race change feature I'll really be looking forward to getting to min-max a bit.
I think the key with what they're hopefully doing in Cataclysm is that "newer" and "more" doesn't always equate to "better", as long as they do what they do well I'm happy with them being minimalistic.