Quests are DEFINATELY too linear now.

One of the things I always enjoy doing is farming zones for particular items while I lvl or "if I missed something" that I need after the fact.

When leveling through Outland or Northrend, I would go "gee, I have really horrid bracers", I'd then look up quest rewards for level-appropriate bracers, find what I need, go to the proper zone and do the quest(s) that drop the bracers I want. I might be able to go straight to the bracer quest, or I might have to do a few quests before getting the item that I want, but it was okay, cuz if I wanted it, I know I could find it and skip over 80 quests that I may have no interest in to get to what I want.

Now with Cataclysm, it seems near-impossible to get anything you want without doing damn-near the entire zone due to the very linear fashion the quests are given in. Case in point, I had two lvl-85 tanks that had the worst luck with the RNG in getting a proper stamina tanking trink, and both my heroic-geared lvl-85 tanks were still stuck with WotLK Corroded Skeleton Key stamina trinks. Despite countless runs in Stonecore (normal and heroic), the RNG Gods laughed at my attempts to get a stamina trink, so in frustration, I searched the lvling zones and found that Twilight Highlands had a pretty decent 318 stamina trink that blew away my old WotLK stam trinket... I thought "gee, this will be a great replacement, i'll just do a few quests and get that instead, 100% garaunteed drop, no RNG Gods laughing at me".

Much to my surprise, I realized that I had to do damn-near half the zone quests just to unlock the quest hub that dropped my stamina trinket. Quest hubs are nice... I like them... I do NOT like quest hubs that must be unlocked in linear fashion from one hub to the next before you can get from quest hub A to B to C.

To Blizzard... if you redo Outlands and/or Northrend in the future, and want to make sure there are nicely grouped quest hubs... that's fine... just let each quest hub stand independant so I don't have to complete every quest in the zone to unlock the quest I want at quest-hub Zulu.