I realize my opinion is & will continue to be highly unpopular, but it is what it is.
IMO, the downfall of this game began the day SOE eliminated shard recovery & shared group debt. Back in those "bad" old days, I had less trouble finding groups, & more fun in them. But since then, SOE has gone to great lengths to eliminate the "need" for grouping, by increasingly making it easier & faster to solo for XP & loot, & the game has been increasingly feeling "gutted."
The downfall continued when SOE neutered Ant, CL, & Nek, & continued its dizzying pace when first Darklight Woods & then Timorous Deep were introduced. After all, who needs to do those dull, boring old zones when you can level to 20 in one afternoon of easy TD questing, then pop over to DLW to finish up the higher level quests there, then hop straight to BBM & ignore the old world entirely?
Now, people are spoiled by easy soloing & legendary items that can be had from nothing more than an easy-breezy faction line, or even fabled stuff like the Thuuga jewelry that many players can obtain solo, & others need no more than a duo to complete. They want their fabled epic soloable. Some of them even want soloable options for mythicals, & think there's nothing wrong with that idea.
That's what happened: too many people who only care about themselves, their own adventure, their own profit, & so have little-to-no interest in dealing with others. Ironically, many of those same people openly accuse "hardcore groupers" of being "selfish."
MMOs have been gutted by the "I want it NOW" generation 