I agree with you and sympathise.
To me though, pretty much everything you said is all because of the age of the game. I started this game SIX years ago, in about 2003. It was called Winter's Roar then, and it was almost a completely different game. The players were nicer, and everyone was new to it.
The game was pretty much exactly as you described. I had only been playing for a week, and someone asked me to join their guild. When I joined there was just about 6 people. He recruited some more, and eventually we had about a dozen people all around level 20 or so. We levelled up, sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs, and sometimes all together.
Eventually we all started reaching level 65, and then we started doing some very basic raids like The Reznolaw. Back then there was no such thing as adepts, and there was a tiny fraction of the loot that exists today. So many of us were wearing things that we got in the 30's, and the few high level items we had, are pathetic when I look back at them now. Nobody had more than 1 or 2 ft, and many people were lacking a lot of spells. We would wipe over and over and over, and we only managed to succeed when we invited people from outside the guild to help.
This was typical of the game back then. There was a few high level guilds like Ruin who did pretty well, and were very experienced and well organised, although even those guys, they had very basic tier 1 / 2 / 3 type gear. Having more than 100AA's was rare and astounding if someone did. I ended up joining them eventually, and at the time, we used to raid Storms Eye as often as possible. It was challenging and dangerous, and we were raiding there with a LOT of people, before the 18 person limit. We were killing mobs in there that no other guild on the server had killed as far as I know.
The robe I got from that place, is now farmed by 1 person... This is a raid mob that used to wipe us with like 20 or so people, when we were the top guild on the server.
This is just "mudflation" and seems to happen to most games. SoD handles it best than most (just look at how bad EQ is now...), but it still exists. It's just a shame you didn't really see it from the start because it was exactly how you wanted it. If you want to still experience that today, you are going to have a hard time. Like people said, most people have done everything, multiple times. Most of the high up guilds do not even do tmaps. All their gear is better than any of the gear dropped from any tmap.
So yeah, all you can really do is try to find people who are new to the game. I levelled up some new characters recently so I did several tmaps over Christmas, and each time it was with other people who were all first time players, so it was really challenging and yet fun. I think you are just going to need to track down as many people like that, as possible. It won't be easy, but you should be able to do it. At one point, I did /who blackburrow tonight and there were 20 people in the zone. Many may have been twinks, but maybe not. It just goes to show there are always new people playing the game. You only have to spend 5 minutes in Dalaya's Beginners to see that, so hopefully you can get to hang around with people like that and try to experience the game as a fresh new player. There are lots of fresh players out there, the trick will be to find the ones who don't just leave Dalaya's Beginners and go straight in to one of those cheaty guilds you described.
most people seem to want to waltz through content.
There isnt a whole lot that can be done about that
Perhaps banning guild hopping scumbags could be a start. It's one thing to go through one or two guilds until you find the right one for you, and it's another thing to go through SEVERAL and use each one to help boost your character and then you just leave them. Or have the entire guild help gear you up to 8k mana etc, and then you just leave and join/form a lower tier guild with over powered characters and walk through all the content and pretend you are god.
It's the SoD equivalent of an aimbot, only it screws a bunch of people in the process.
