I think one of the things that exacerbates this problem is that the meat of the meaningful content exists strictly within dungeons / raids and BGs / Arena currently. There's a lot of vertical progression but very little horizontal - you're always rising, but you're never stretching, moving around.

The idea of the Pet Battle system is actually a decent example of a new type of meaningful content, where the method of progression (collecting pets & pet abilities) is completely separate from gear, and so changes to any gear-related content have no effect on it. Wether or not pet battles will actually turn out to be an enjoyable thing is yet to be seen.

While the Crusader's Coliseum is mostly unremarkable, it too has potential in becoming new content. It could be a PVE arena of sorts, where you and two friends must rise through the ranks and conquer many different kinds of challenges, like a fight where healing is needed but each heal causes your max hp to drop by x%, or a fight where you have to chuck bombs into the audience to blow down corpses that you use to distract a hungry one-shotting Abomination.

There's probably more examples, but it really boils down to WoW needing to grow out instead of up all the time.

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