What surprises me is Daoc doesn't feel that crap or aged at all. With the bundled expansions the graphics arent half bad and actually stand up surprisinglyy well against more recent games. I still love just exploring Daoc for the scenery. Perhaps it's because Daoc feels like a world not just a load of theme park zones artificially stapled together (ToA being the exception of course). What lets the game down most is the UI which is clunky by modern standards. That said, it's only really WoW which has raised the UI bar a long long way. WAR, Aion, Lotro, AoC, CoH etc all have pretty nasty UIs that should be a lot better.
As for the gameplay, I still prefer Daoc's mechanics. Combat whether melee or caster just feels so much more immediate and snappy. I think all the fancy animations in WAR and Aion etc just give an impression of lack of connection with your character. And the interupt code in Daoc is still better than any other system tried since and keeps casters from being totally OP (imagine if Bright Wizards in WAR had to deal with interupts).
What has surprised me is there's actually people still joining Daoc for the first time. A trickle of course, but a steady one and I'm amazed there's any at all tbh. But perhaps it shows that people want something they're not getting from other games out there. Mythic should get their act together and shoehorn all the existing content into a brand new game engine and UI and relaunch it as Daoc Reloaded or something. There's been some amateur efforts which have actually migrated the Daoc scenery inside the Crysis engine, with pretty nice results, so it can be done.
There's no level grind anymore. Brigh and I went from 8 to 18 in a few hours of Warrior + Spritmaster pbaoe mayhem (admittedly with a buffbot) and my Runie is level 46 with 2.5 days /played on the clock (its a lot quicker to the endgame now than WoW).
Of course I'm not trying to be a cheerleader and gloss over the fact that ToA and to a lesser extent Champ Levels still hang over the endgame like a dark cloud. Plus after so much time the endgame is dominated by some seriously hardcore players, as you might expect. And you still need buffs (though there's now npcs you can get buffs from that are almost as good as a buffbot). But that doesn't mean there's not some fun to be had.
But I can also understand about keeping memories as just that. We ran a pretty successful 8-man team and so this influences things. There's no way of getting back to that, so you have to lower expectations, and I can understand how this might alter some good memories.