I enjoyed a lot of early wow, didn't really get that far in classic my guild was pretty casual but we did farm MC to death, i think all 40 ppl were full t1 by the time TBC rolled around (i remember clearly it took 37 raggy kills till he dropped transcendence legs we ran with 7 or 8 priests at the time me being one of them), we managed to kill vael after a few wipe fests and that was a pretty nice achievement at the time it meant we had the dps for the rest of the place. for tbc i switched to a semi hc raiding guild and managed to do everything but sunwell.
i think the comparisons to wow aren't that great for me because, i went from diablo 2 to wow, so it was amazing at the time, going from sprite based loot farm to a full 3d mmorpg, considering i'd played nothing before that which even came close as a comparison. where as for elite, my expectations were over shadowed by games like the x series, freespace 2, eve .. i dunno i personally was expecting a bit more but this isn't me complaining because i'm still playing elite still exploring anyway.. just saying the comparison isn't the best. comparing a sub based mmorpg with a ton of features at launch to elite thats multiplayer-ish and has 4 core gameplay aspects. wow on launch had 9 classes? a direction, multiple stories, quite a lot of replayability, where as you can pretty much do all there is to do in elite in anything between a week and a few days depending on whether or not you enjoy repeating any of those 4 things ad infinitum is really all that matters.
currently my go to theme park mmo is tera, i prefer the combat and i play it extremely casually, grinding when i feel like it, doing dungeons or pvp when i feel like it, never rushing to get anything.