I've ran all of BRD at "once", which was really like a 5-6hours experience, doing all the quests in there. A lot of the areas were simply completely worthless in terms of loot and were just there for quests. Pretty much half the bosses in there had a single blue in their loot table(that they didn't drop everytime) and were simply there as quest mobs. That's one of the issues with BRD, first it was 45-52 so the lvl spread was too big, second the rewards were shitty, third it wasn't endgame either so most people didn't need to run it. It would have done a pretty cool non instanced area but as a 5man dungeon it was kinda shitty especially since you couldn't "save" to start again the day after with your group and shit like that, you had to reclear everything and stuff. It was simply too big to explore decently without a static group and since it wasn't at cap it was likely people would outlvl it before completing it too if they just quested somewhere else while waiting for their friends to connect the day after.
Stratholme at least was level cap and had a ton of good loot. While most people picked one of the 2 wings to clear and rarely cleared both or did the shit in the middle with the mailboxes, you could do both for fairly good rewards and it was clear what to do and shit. That's why in terms of game design I think Stratholme was a ton better than BRD. BRD only advantage was the crazy level design, with the multiple levels and multiple shortcuts, you could go from one place to another very quickly if you could visualize the dungeon entirely and know that dropping down a certain place brings you to another. Other than that though it was a failure.
The issue is always the same, doesn't matter how you paint it: people will only do something that rewards them appropriately, most people, that is. Adventuring is not a reward in itself for the vast majority of the playerbase.
BRD had some issues, of which I think the level spread (48-58 as I remember it, may be wrong) was the biggest and the fact it took a couple evenings picking up all the quests, but the whole blackrock mountain design, brd, lbrs, ubrs, mc, bwl, was freaking awesome, it had a meaning and was a focal point in the world, it was tied deeply into the lore (for those who knew something about it) and it was also pretty fun in terms of exploration, content and boss mechanics (for the era).
BRD had stuff like the bank vaults, the Lyceum, ecc which were an example of good and fun design for adventurers, of course much less so for the token addicted players that must speed run everything they do in every game.
WoW vanilla was nice in terms of dungeon design, not amazing, but nice. I still think EQ2 was better in terms of layouts and exploration and general "feeling", from the city sewers to Stormhold which was amazing, to Nektropos Castle, Solusek Eye, etc.
Also, meanwhile TBC made every dungeon a hallway with 3 rooms, Desert of Flame, shitty xpack as it was, made dungeons still good (Silent City, Poet's Palace, etc. almost all of them were quite good imo). That alone made EQ2 worth playing for quite a while, even with crappy spammy combat and bland classes.
