There's SO MANY FACTORS that you aren't considering in this post that it makes my headspin. The market has changed so much since the games you mentioned -- how can you possibly expect the games to be the same in a market that has changed so wildly?
SWG sold 1m boxes and peaked at 250k subscribers?
EQ peaked at 450k or so?
DAoC peaked at 410k (interview with Mark Jacobs about CU, I'd have to go digging for it).
WoW, NOT Vanilla WoW, but Wrath of the Lich King, peaked at more than 3x all 3 of those games combined.
The market disagrees with you, simply, but let's talk a bit about your accusation of a "money grab."
There's this notion of a money grab because so many games launch and fail now because of a few bad eggs in otherwise talented studios. When you look at some of these failures, they leave you scratching your head -- WAR was gutted by EA, who actually even forced the studio head out to have their way with the game, SWTOR not only had EA oversight, but was put on a god awful game engine incapable of handling the WAR part of Star Wars (and thus feels like a single player experience), Rift had some REALLY BAD decisions made about it (scaling back Rifts, poor class balance, etc.), WildStar was dragged through the mud by producers, ESO had no identity at release (wasn't an elder scrolls game, wasn't a "real" MMO either), Tera struggled in Western markets due to the Korean grind influence, Age of Conan was actually ran into the ground by bugs above all other things due to its release competition with WAR and WoW...need I go on?
But simply put, the truth is, the things that broke these games were all things us hardcore folks were willing to overlook when 400k was huge subscriber numbers. The problem was that WoW was the first game to swell the market into the millions and it wasn't vanilla WoW that did it -- it was the burning crusade, which was then a joke compared to the subscriber numbers for Wrath.
But that's the problem. For a HUGE swathe of the market, Wrath of the Lich King, an MMO's 2nd expansion pack, was their first MMO. The level of polish those people walked into dwarfed anything a fresh release, even a 2015 fresh release, could hope to achieve. It's the equivalent of getting to release an MMO with a 9 year development cycle (development on WoW started in '99 if memory serves).
Go look at the Glassdoor reviews of half the companies behind the games you're calling cashgrabs -- how do their employees feel?
The genre isn't dying. The market is changing. Those two things aren't synonymous.
Studios are just now finally giving up on chasing WoW. There's a huge movement towards making niche, targeted games that go back to accepting 400k as solid subscriber numbers. Look at Crowfall, look at Camelot Unchained -- these are games that know EXACTLY what their target audience wants, how big their target audience is, and they are gunning exactly for that target audience.
This isn't even getting into the fact that us old guard folks, are well, old. I mean, I'm only 23, but I've been playing MMOs for 14 years now. The dudes I started out playing MMOs with are mostly married and have kids, some of 'em have kids as old I was when I started playing by now.
These games aren't based on a hidden D20 system any more.
Just think, for a second, about even the complexity of class specialization. I'll use DAoC as an example, since it had 46 classes in it, and no, they weren't perfect mirror classes.
So, for melee classes, speccing in a weapon did two things. One, it unlocked weapon styles (melee abilities), but two, it reduced damage variance. DAoC is still, to this date, basically has invisible dice rolls going on its game engine (hyperbole, not literally). Speccing in a melee weapon line basically ups your minimum roll on that dice roll.
Your specialization could also get bonus enchantments from gear, which would further help reduce variance.
To give a cleaner example, let's compare the three heavy tanks of DAoC: Midgard's Warrior, Hibernia's Hero, and Albion's Armsman.
The Warrior got access 1h and 2h weapons by default -- if you specialized in Axe, for example, your Axe styles worked with any axe weapon, 1h or 2h, and your axe damage variance would be lowered. This meant Warriors, who wore Midgard chain (which had the same absorption factor as Hibernian Scalemail and Albion chain armor, but different natural resistances to damage types), were able to specialize fully in a weapon and a shield (unlocking shield styles and increasing their block chance), and then put their left over points into parry (increasing their chance to parry attacks).
Heroes had the options to specialize in Blunt, Blades, or Piercing weapons (Crush, Slash, and Thrust damage -- importnat to note in a second), Celtic Spear (slash or thrust damage), shields (block chance and shield abilities), parry (parry chance), and large weapons (slash or crush damage). In order to get access to Celtic Spear or Large Weapon melee abilities, you had to spend points in them, but their damage variance depended on your skill in the corresponding weapon type (blades for slash, pierce for thrust, blunt for crush). Every heavy tank also wanted at least 42 points in shield, for the ability Slam, an on-demand stun.
This meant for both Heroes and Armsman, they had to specialize in a 2h weapon, a 1h weapon, a shield, and parry, instead of just a weapon, shield, and parry, and your 2h needed to match the damage type of your 1h specialization.
These classes were further differentiated by the fact Armsman wore plate armor instead of scale/chain (plate had a slightly higher absorption % and different natural resistances) and their 2h (polearms) had a slower swing speed (more burst damage); the Hero had access to a Stag form which would double his maximum HP, and scale armor had different resistances from Midgard chain.
In return, Midgard's Warriors got higher weapon skill (an absurdly complicated formula that effectively determined melee hit chance and damage) as well as slightly higher block and parry chances.
It took me 2000 characters to explain the broad differences in a simplified manner between the three most similar classes in Dark Age of Camelot. Here's how you specialize a Destruction Lock in World of Warcraft: http://www.icy-veins.com/wow/destruction-warlock-pve-dps-spec-builds-talents-glyphs
So yes, obviously the games are different, because the market is different. Our generation is old man now. Either hop on board one of the niche games coming out in a couple years, or maybe just accept the genre isn't what she used to be. Best Rock Album of 1980 is not the same best rock album in 2015 -- why would that be true for MMORPGs?