WAR is a good game, and haters are always gonna hate. But on the other hand, WoW enjoys economies of scale. Also, Blizzard can throw more money at the problem and can have more and better talent on their payroll. Their salaries are competitive with similar positions in other industries --- the talent at Blizzard is no longer made up of 2nd-grade people who couldn't get work in more mainstream industries. Then there's the factor of sheer manpower. As hard as each person at Mythic works, they will struggle to compete with the multiple people Blizzard can afford to assign to the same task. This especially makes a difference for development tasks like creating new content or fixing bugs. WoW has the upper hand and it will be the constant vortex that sucks people away from niche or up-and-coming games. The pressure is on the little guys to grab and hold the attention of the gamers. Furthermore, because of the mature state that WoW is in, it is freer to innovate or make drastic changes (Cataclysm) while the new guy is still busy carving out his niche or ironing out bugs. Then again, WoW doesn't even need to innovate. MMO startups like WAR can have brilliant ideas, but WoW is in an awesome position to steal them. You can bet that whatever good idea that is well-received in WAR is already considered or will be considered for assimilation into WoW. Blizzard runs WoW like a good business and that's something good businesses can do. It just takes a few false steps from WAR and WoW will be waiting to slurp the unsubscribers into its belly.
However, it's not entirely WoW's fault. What you see is really a product of WAR's current policy. Mythic has been a shy about recruiting since the initial ruckus. Now, it's as if they want people to come to WAR, but only on their own terms and in their own time. It's a more hippie approach to running a business. Compare WAR's approach with WoW's marketing attacks and things like their super attractive recruit-a-friend program: triple XP, free game time, rewards, free summons to each other, free levelling, etc. WAR is intentionally taking it slow. They want people to discover the game by themselves and form their own opinion about it, instead of getting blasted with a huge population influx and not be able to support it; or getting everyone hyped and not being able to deliver (again). So what we see today is a result of WAR's own low and slow marketing/recruiting: many people are just peeking over the fence and forming their opinions from there.
All that aside, one thing that bothered me about WAR (being the small little-guy hippie game), was that I never really felt like I was ever rewarded for being a loyal customer. What's wrong with sending me double renown tokens in the mail every few months? Unique vanity items or dyes or trinkets to decorate my armor with? Tome unlocks? Or even some free game time? These things cost nothing to give out in the digital world, but they are meaningful as a token of gratitude saying, "Thanks for sticking with us through thick and thin; we appreciate your support". They can give bigger rewards to the people who stuck it out since the beginning, or those who have stayed subscribed for 1 year, 2 years, etc.
Mythic has made very bad management decisions in the past. They made even worse decisions when EA came into the picture and they tried to make it more like WoW. They should have just figured out what they wanted to do from the start, and focused on that. It sounds like they're finding their niche now as Bioware-Mythic and they're making better decisions, but the odds are against the little guy and...
We now had a positional advantage. With the Order defense committed to the west keep, the defense at BOs *should* be much lighter. But we didn't have much time left now. We only had a few minutes before the zone was captured. As we were grouping up at the south warcamp, we noticed some Destro flying in. REINFORCEMENTS! Apparently most of the Destro were in other zones, waiting for them to lock. That was why we were outnumbered here in Thunder Mountain. We spammed region chat to tell everyone to hit C. We didn't have much time left to try anything fancy. 
A and C are easily defendable by one force, since there's a speedy route connecting the two. B on the other hand, would not be defended unless a defensive force was explicitly placed there. We rode north around the west road as sneakily as we could, and tried to hit B. There was a warband just sitting in the cave waiting for us! It was incredibly hard to cap a BO with a choke point separating us, since our people were not able to get past the choke point effectively enough, and the defenders were continuously getting rezzed. Despite some intense fighting, we could not make any progress. Even when we could get through, we could not take the BO NPCs down. Furthermore, the people who died inside were out of range for a rez. Damn, the number of Order in the zone kept climbing.
The order zerg would have been cautious by then. They knew what kind of numbers we had and they knew we were trying hard to stop them. So we needed to try something different. Something sneaky. We decided to send 3 groups to A, and my original Scenario group would try to take D. The groups sent to A would be the distraction and they would try to catch as much attention as they could, for as long as they could. This was to try to drain their numbers toward the west. and hopefully leave D weak. We waited on the PVE road by D as long as we could, until we saw that the rest of our warband was struggling. Then, we charged at D. To our surprise, we found a warband sitting outside the BO, waiting. They looked like they had no intention to react to anything --- they were just content to sit there at the BO until the zone locked. Our group hit the Order wall and died. I asked for a report of how many people reacted to their attack on A. They said that they were close to getting it, but the numbers were even greater now.
Change of plans. Since the warbands of Order were just going to sit at the BOs, we had to do something else. No sense hitting them head on where they have the advantage. Our final attempt to save the zone was to hit the west keep. Keeps take longer to capture than BOs, but with a warband we could at least take the outer door down, and pressure the Order zergs. If the outer door was down, Order would be forced to divert their numbers to defend the keep, or we could easily bust down the inner and kill the Keep Lord. This would also tie up some Order at the Keep since the outer door would stay down for a few minutes after it is destroyed.
C is the closest to the warcamp, so we decided to go have a quick look to see what we were going up against. There were a couple of groups defending. This is the typical situation when a zone is close to locking, since C is closest to the warcamp, and it is the most susceptible to attacks from people flying in to defend the zone. I usually estimate the numbers at C to represent 80% of the people in the zone. 
We barely filled 2 groups, and we hit C from our warcamp. As expected, the greedy Order zerglings were waiting for A to flip for their 500 RP and C was lightly defended. We flipped C, put 30 minutes back on the clock, but we were wiped by a bigger zerg than what we had seen before. This meant that more Order PVE zerglings were trickling into the zone to try to collect their zone lock rewards. Despite the loss, this confirmed that we had an advantage. The warbands we were facing were very zergy. It looked like they would have communication problems for complicated directions, and we could easily out-maneuver them. It helped that our warband had good players and that all they needed to know was the plan, and they would each know how to execute it to each of their class' best abilities. From all our fights with the zerg, we also knew we could out-PVP them.
