Genuinely based and I would be very tempted if they at all did fucking anything about gold buying and boosting. When Wrath first dropped all the way up until that tool came out, it was such a good time.
A few months back I briefly rolled a dude on the Warmane private server and was having a good time... right up until I realized I could just hit a button, teleport halfway across the world to a dungeon with randos, and that was going to be effectively the only way to level from that point onwards. I had wondered why for having such a big active population, there were so few people in the world.
except dungeon finder was never the problem, as much as people whine about it. it was merely a symptom, not the cause.
by the time dungeon finder came out (december 2009), people were well aware that dungeons were nothing more than a timesink to grind for loot and emblems, so efficiency was king because everybody just wanted to get the daily chore done, the whole GOGOGO mentality you mentioned earlier didn't suddenly appear after people could run dungeons with randoms and the click of a button.
no one in LK ran dungeons for the "challenge" or to "socialize". the former people got out of raids because that was blizzard pushed as the real endgame, and people mostly talked outside the game at that point (the internet of 2009 was quite a different place than the one from vanilla in 2004).
almost everything people attribute to dungeonfinder (and LFR to an extend) already was part of the game beforehand, and removing it won't change anything besides making people bitch and moan. the few casuals in the game won't sit in the capitol spamming chat to find a group, most of the time they can't even be arsed to write a entry in the PF. the people with established guilds and friendslist never really needed the dungeon finder in the first place.
don't get me wrong, but at this point it's like "have you tried not playing
dnd WoW? other games never really had that issue to that degree, if at all. so instead of trying to find it in a game which developed in a direction which doesn't really support that anymore, and thus attracted that kind of playerbase, why not pick one which actually does?
The best middleground would be for them to enable you to just search for parties on your own server. Offer up the convenience, but don't completely kill the sense of community. At the very least, let there be a battlegroup/server toggle - but that'd require effort, so fat chance.
and no one will use it. ask yourself, if you're looking for a group at 3 am on a server with a faction population of <10%, would your rather wait forever till you fall asleep or increases your chances of something happening by increasing the pool of potential groupmembers? because that was the main reason people used it: queue times, not "grand adventures in an instance with likeminded people".
if you want to blame anyone blame blizzard themselves, because if the only option is this or shelling out 20 bucks per char to find a non-dead server (or start from scratch), guess what people rather pick. all because blizzard is still too arrogant to actually merge servers which is a clear sign the population is declining.
also lol @ community, just because you remove it the game won't suddenly go it's boomer mmo roots. one look how people play classic should tell you enough, that ship has sailed ages ago. ffs it's like people forgot cata already tried all that with dungeons suddenly being "hard" again after everyone whined for it and requiring coordination and communication - and how long did that last?