I really don't know what you're getting at. I really don't see why every single MMORPG has to be in the same mold as Everquest. Why should every single MMORPG be about grinding, or be as slow-paced as Everquest? Having no cooldowns on potions was hardly 'disasterous' as you seem to think prior to the end of Closed Beta.
In fact it worked very well from the beginning of Closed Alpha until the end of Closed Beta, until they implemented cooldowns. The only people who were happy about it were those idiotic Thief players who at the time were seriously nerfed, and seemed to think that having Mages do the most amount of damage in the game was 'imbalanced' inspite of the fact that Mages had so many disadvantages. They wanted every class to be as nerfed as they were and campaigned to have Mages reduced in power. Granted, nobody, not even the mages opposed a simple reduction in damage, but in addition to the reduction in damage, Blizzard made it so that these reduced power spells used even more mana than before, rendering them essentially worthless. I'll wager that nobody even uses Pyroblast in retail due to its weak damage and incredible mana usage.
World of Warcraft may have never been meant to be Diablo, but who said it was meant to be Everquest, either? It is my belief that VU insisted on the implementation of Everquest's formulaic design in order to release the game as quickly as they did in order to meet Christmas sales. Most of us CB testers assumed that the game would have still been in closed beta even now, because there was still so much to implement (PVP Battlegrounds, anyone?) and balance. In June, Blizzard even promised to have Player Housing implemented by its retail release date. You know that portal behind the locked gate in Stormwind City? That's supposed to lead to the player housing. Now, Blizzard's gone back on their word and announced that Player Housing may only become available upon the release of the game's first expansion pack. This is an atrocity, especially considering that Anarchy Online and Dark Age of Camelot both had player housing upon release or had it implemented for free at a later date. DAOC has Realm vs Realm battles which are far superior to Blizzard's proposed Battlegrounds PVP, which will likely amount to nothing more than a zerg rush. Even Lineage 2's Castle CVC (clan vs clan) and tax system is superior to that, though the implementation was incredibly buggy until the most recent free expansion.
Concerning WOW, it was probably meant to be closer to Diablo 2 (Talents tree, anyone?) than to Everquest when it was conceptualized a few years ago by Jeff Strain, who now works at ArenaNet on Guild Wars. He left when VU was flexing their corporate muscle on Blizzard to create the 'next Everquest game'. The evidence of this is plain to see. Half the game consists of good but completely unrealized concepts like the talent tree, warrior stances, mage and thief utility abilities (lockpicking, mage's open lock, mage invisibility, thief's feint, mage's blink, etc) fast paced combat and quick health/mana regeneration. Most of these artifacts of a 'different WOW' have since been removed from the game, and Warrior stances are all but worthless now. You'd be surprised at how useful mages were. Now, they're just ranged nukers/AOE casters. So much for the Wizards of Warcraft. Now they're just the Wizards of Everquest v2. Hell, the Priest's mind sooth doesn't really work anymore and I'm not even sure if Mind Control works on players anymore. So much for PVP priests. So much for World of Warcraft. They might as well call it World of Everquest.