The EQ team never gets credit for the amount of content they churned out. They averaged TWO expansions packs a year from 2000 - 2007. That is fourteen expansions, for those that struggle with math.
What had WoW done 7 years after it had launched? 3 expansions... and for those that would say, "But WoW expansions were much more fleshed out and provided much more content than EQ's." I say, nah. Anytime Blizzard launched a new expansion or a new content patch, it took me a month to maximize, 'best in slot', what ever the fuck you want to use as the measurement of completing the content. And, I am just your full time job holding, typical MMO player that cut their teeth on EQ. Not some 24/7 poopsocker that lives in their mom's basement. After Vanilla WoW, I played TBC, WLK, and Cata on average 4 weeks each in the 104 week time periods it took to get the mother fuckers out.
The total time I paid WoW $15 per month pales in comparison to the total number $9.99/$15 payments I sent to Verant/Sony.
All in all, WoW is the superior game, I am not going to argue otherwise... but, I loved EQ because I always had a reason to play it. WoW fucking bored me to death a lot of times. The EQ team and Smed definitely cut corners, released unfinished content, but at least they shipped an insane amount of content and expansions that gave me awesome memories and countless hours of fun. EQ GoD expansion and EQ2 was definitely their biggest missteps, but with the Blizzard brand bringing a history 10 million box sales per franchise into the MMO space, nothing Smed or the EQ team could have done or not done would have held back that tsunami that wiped everyone else out.