Leveling is pretty good in vanilla to be honest, It's basically the same to how it is in TBC or Wrath, the leveling hubs model is mostly used in a similar way to later expansions and there's breadcrumbs to everywhere. You only have to grind mobs for the last few levels if you're silly with your quests. Vanilla has more than enough quests to get 60 from

Grindy? If you don't like grind, why would you be even playing an MMORPG 0.o, Grinding is one of the Core principles behind the genre, it's part of effort > reward, as in you grind for hours because you know you're going to get something sick at the end of it, and that in itself is rewarding as fuck.

Yes a lot of specs aren't viable in a min-max raid environment, but every class still has at least one 100% raid viable spec, and can often use other specs for PVP and such, or do hybrid biulds. I mean guilds even sometimes take a feral and balance druid.

Yes there was a lot of tedious stuff, I will grant you that, but to me it just adds to the magic, I'm going to just say that's personal preference.