Well, yeah, off course there was a downside...because there's a downside to everything. There were downsides to Zone expansions, improvements and additions. There were downsides to the addition of temp travel powers. There were downsides to expanding the roles of bases, adding Ouroboros, etc, etc, etc. The question is this: did the benefits outweigh the negatives? For my money, the answer to that is a resounding "yes", but as with so much in life (virtual or otherwise), your mileage may vary.
As for walking around on WoW...I wouldn't know. I've never played WoW, and never will. As such I don't have it as a means of comparison.
What I do have to compare it to is recalling what it was like on CoH circa issue 4 when compared to later additions. Sure, I too missed the street-sweepings, but that aside, I vastly prefered the way the game felt and played when it ended as opposed to its earlier days. I didn't miss being defeated in the Hollows and having to Hosp it to Atlas and then run all the way back to the mish door, or miss crossing Grendel's Gulch using "hover". And those were just two specific examples.
The problem wasn't the QoL improvements: the problem was with how they were used.