The runescape game benefits interactivity and effort. With effort comes an investment of time, skill, and assets. Due to this, when you make people get angry. Pointing fingers at"the elitist pvming neighborhood" and relating that to buy RS gold the decrease of the runescape game is a complete misunderstanding of how the runescape game works.
Runescape is reward and an achievement. What may really be"killing" the runescape game is the enthusiastic attitude that you talk about and invite other people to hold that the highest accomplishments in runescape game (not only pvming but also max, 120s, comp, trimming, etc) is unachievable for most of the runescape playerbase. Rather than enjoying with the runescape game for those achievements, you get angry at people who have them or dissuade people from opting for all those achievements by saying they're insurmountable.
I really don't think this issue is exclusive to RS or EoC. For a few brief context, I played RS full-time (Level 138, about a dozen 99s, near-top tier equipment ) around 7 decades back. I have seen a bit of discussion on it here, although I understand nothing about EoC. In my experience between the two games, WoW is exceptionally clunky, I've struggled with getting a hang of the mechanics for it more than most games.
Yes, the capability positioning and turning is generally straightforward. WoW has got the hunter course, (which I was recommended to begin with) which is largely just that. You have a couple things to remember to maintain toggled/aware of at all times: Factors toggles that are auto-cast, trinket activations kinds. Several of them are set-it-and-forget-it by the onset of a fight. However, on top of that. Most courses have too many abilities to match on the keys that your palms can physically reach, so you are usually stuck with clunky modifier keys (shift-1, ctrl Q) to be able to effectively use abilities.
The target system coupled with the implemented"facing" mechanics. In other words, you need to be confronting an opponent to attack thembut you can be perpendicular towards them, and also targeting an enemy doesn't snap your character's location towards them, you have to manually directly click-hold-turn the camera whilst WASD positioning yourself at range to what to make with gold in old school runescape target them. In my experience, the case the clunky mechanics for all have been from the Lord Marrowgar fight. Bit hard to tell, but the boss has a totally ridiculously large hitbox, but your range isn't much larger than the hitbox, therefore the real"ring" around the boss you can hit is rather narrow.