How Blizzlike?

[Crichton]

So, after the shutdown of Nost and Kronos being a mess of queues and overpopulation and under the threat of being shut down, I'm now looking at less popular servers and I love the idea of this one (being progressive and all). I know the leveling/talents are up to WOTLK, but is the experience close to Vanilla overall?

Is BIS gear for vanilla still BIS?
Do dungeons and CC mechanics feel right?
Is the time-investment on par with vanilla (in terms of needing to farm endgame stuffs?)
Any class overpopulated to the point where finding a raid spot would be difficult?

I really like the idea of playing with a more close-knit community, and like the convenience of RDF. In a nutshell, my concern would be more if the changes made here feel "right".

[Relevant]

Pretty much just bumping for someone like Kurthos to jump in and give a much better explanation that I really can (he's good at this stuff), but my 2 cents:

For the overall question of "How blizzlike", I'd say currently, at this point, not very. Think of it as WOTLK expansion that's just locked at level 60. There are exceptions to this, such as the talent tree being locked at 31, mounts being at 40, raid difficulty increased, etc. But I think that if you think in terms of this, your expectations will be closer to reality.

Is BIS gear for vanilla still BIS? For the most part, it's pretty close. Maybe not exact.
Do dungeons and CC mechanics feel right? For the most part, yes. There are some differences from retail (using warlock eye for BRD prison runs, etc).
Is the time-investment on par with vanilla (in terms of needing to farm endgame stuffs?) It's WOTLK experience. So even though it's 1x rates, it's much faster to level. End game grind feels about the same, though. The Silithus questline is still a bitch, etc.
Any class overpopulated to the point where finding a raid spot would be difficult? Not that I can think of.

[Fitzpatrick]

http://www.truewow.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=34457

I think Relevant summed it up nicely here, though.