Give me a character I feel attached to
I can feel your pain with this. I rolled a hunter back towards the end of Vanilla WoW (got her to 60 a month before BC). She's still my main but damn, it's as if she's lost almost all of here uniqueness. Back then hunters were quite difficult to master (tho easy to play badly, hence the huntard). Almost all pets were different, even within families. I remember when I dinged 10 and could finally tame a pet. I had done research on what pet I wanted. It was The Rake, a rare and cool looking cat in Mulgore. Seeing as I was a NE I had to make a perilous journey across Horde infested zones (on a PVP server). But it was epic, and fun, and the cat was there when I finally got to Mulgore. The Rake also had a very high DPS (1.4 iirc), which no other cat had until the mid 40's, and that wreaked havoc on casters (before the nerfs).
Pet spells didn't come automatically either. You had to find and tame other pets that had them, use them a while til you learned them, and then you could teach them to your main pet. Oh, and you also had to feed your pet to keep it happy. I remember sometimes after pulling too much and thinking this is the end, just to finally scrape through with both of us barely alive and all the mobs dead and feeding her just as a "reward" for being awesome.
Then there were the talents, as I wasn't in a Raiding guild it meant I was more free to choose the talents I wanted, so I focused on BM and tried to make my pet as tough and deadly as I could.
What I'm saying is that all this effort you needed to pour into that character, and the extension of that character, made it so that you (or at least I) bonded more with them. It wasn't really until Wrath, and especially Cata, that I started to bother with alts, as by then most of the magic had faded. Pets were basically all the same, no need to feed them or keep them happy and all that. Sure, it made playing a hunter easier, but it killed something for me.
