That strikes me as largely an illusion of freedom though. I know for a fact that the Old World Loremaster achievements were quite a bit harder to do, and I think that has a lot to do with how much better it is in Outland and Northrend with their zone-specific sub-achievements.

If you have ten quests left in all of Kalimdor, you might need to look over the quest offerings for the whole continent to figure out what more you can do. If, however, you know for a fact it's ten quests in Felwood that are holding you back, that goes a very long way to making it easier to get the achievement done.

Add to that that in my experience that the number of quests needed for the zone achievements is usually set at a pretty reasonable level. You'll need to really dedicate yourself to questing in a zone, but you'll by no means need to track down every single quest in the whole zone to get the achievement. I generally finished up the Northrend and Outland achievements with several questlines still in progress.

Finally, I beloeve the total number of quests required for Loremaster of EK and Kalimdor are being lowered for both Alliance and Horde, so again, this will be easier to manage post-Cataclysm.

While it doesn't make it "easier" in the overall effort needed to complete the achievement (as we'll have to do more quests now), it certainly makes it more manageable.

Old Loremaster was hard for the wrong reasons, namely that it was a pain in the butt to keep track of which quests you might be missing where. Blizzard had to provide API support to make it even reasonable to complete (by allowing addons to query all quests you'd completed).

And don't kid yourself; having a certain number to do on a given continent did /not/ give more choice as to where you could quest. The number required still entailed doing nearly every single quest in every single zone.

I look forward to doing Loremaster post 4.0.3a. I would have hated making myself do it the old way.

correction:

We'll have to do more quests now overall, with the cataclysm zones now part of the achievement.

I feel like adding that I got Loremaster a while ago, and at the time I got loremaster of Eastern Kingdoms, as Alliance, I completely skipped Stranglethorn Vale, as I was hated with the goblins. Of course I had done the kill some pirates, kill some zombies and a bunch of animal quests while leveling, but I still skipped 20+ quests, and I had alot of quests left to choose from. Kalimdor was harder of course, but had the new system been in place, I wouldn't have gotten my achievement the way I did.

(I had to grind back goblin rep for Mudsprocket, Gadgetzan and Ratchet when I switched continent of course)