Even World of Warcraft which used to be seamless in terms of issues, has had increasingly more and more obvious bugs. A sad state from the "Blizzard polish" of yesteryear.
And every expansion was just a nightmare start, without being able to get to the new zone, servers again crashing.
You just have golden memories of a state that never happened. Game wise, WoW has gone forward a lot since DF (the disaster of SL taught them something) and is actually in a lot better state than before. Sure, it has bugs, but it's also a massive game. And they do keep fixing a lot of bugs with quite good response time these days instead of what it used to be.
I understand it’s an old game, but these parts seem like pure laziness. I’m sure this laziness costs them a lot of players who leave the initial mission in disgust and never get to see the beautiful parts of WoW.