The 'level' thing is something inherited from old RPGs and computer RPGs and reused to death. It is nice for a sense of progression, but ultimately leads to all sorts of issues.
Why can a 99 level whatever kill dozens of level 1 charaters effortlessly, by mistake even? Why does it have N times more health? Makes no sense.
One of the first successful MMORPG games was Ultima Online, which didn't have any levels. Just skills. And they didn't matter all that much. Equipment did to a degree, but noone was walking around alone with a +9 weapon for fear of losing it. So it was relatively even.
It was FUN. All areas mattered, even if they didn't have as much variety as WoW. Monsters didn't give XP, so they were mostly killed for resources. And some tiny skill increase, sometimes.
Honestly, that was what I loved about EvE: no levels. Pick a goal and the skills to get there. Enjoy the journey along the way.
Edited to add: There was once the perception that if you weren't an older player you could never catch up with them because of the first-come nature of skills, but that was demolished long ago (for better or worse) by blobbing with Caldari battlecruisers. Sheer numbers will beat anything, and if you are losing it is because your sheer numbers aren't big enough.
If you haven't got X months in battleship skills, you can't fit one to fit with the rest of the gang, so you'd have to fly support. Then the next level is carrier/dreadnoughts.
Which really isn't too different from not having good enough gear in WoW and so on, the only difference is that in EVE you level up even when you're offline. And you don't have to fly anything, you do whatever you want to. Brave Newbies is probably the most famous for flying what ever the hell they could.
And they're still effective. Skills determined what roles you could perform well, but not that you couldn't participate.
I personally loved flying support, and knowing that not many people wanted to (or could!) gave me a valuable niche that not only made me feel important, but made me valuable in the eyes of my fleet mates as well. Hearing the FC call out "Hey guys, we actually have a logi in our BS fleet tonight, so be sure to call for reps" was great.
Those "newb" roles often have their own perks. You'll hear many a veteran speak of how a new player gets to enjoy certain things a veteran can't. We quite enjoyed bringing a new player on and explaining to them that these first days were their best, for now that they were in a corp, their costs were taken care of. Loss in EVE is the biggest, most stressful thing to manage, and it's fantastic telling a new guy "Look, you're inexpensive, so just tackle anything you can, we'll pay for your clones, buy you a stack of frigates. Enjoy these days you're expendable, and have fun while you're waiting for your skills to train up."
Those guys come in at a couple of months and tackle some Vindicator, and get on a 3bil ISK killmail. Show me a WoW level 10 that does that.
There was a big pay2win market in the form of buying characters, which was easily possible as you could buy them with in-game money and have them transferred. And you could buy in-game money by buying subscriptions and selling them for in-game money.
So there was a huge dollar to isk stream possible, which funded any gear or indeed any character (and thereby levels) you wanted.
The other way around of course existed (isk to dollar) but it was harder and not within the TOS.
I never did see lots of abuse of rich players and it never felt like a pay to win type of game to me or most people, but that factor definitely existed.
It's worth bearing in mind, of course, that WoW is vastly more popular than UO ever was -- UO peaked around 250k subscribers, WoW peaked around 12 million (~48 times the population). This presumably indicates that far more people found it "fun".
This makes sense to me, since pre-Trammel UO was a griefer paradise, as you hinted at with your "for fear of using it" comment. :)
I don't know that the peak subscriber comparison is fair, UO was released in 1997 when a far smaller portion of the population had the computer hardware / internet to even consider it compared to WoW in ~2005.
I wonder how much of WoW's popularity is not just from mechanics, however. Ultima Online is rather boring to look at: it's a 2D game, and not a particularly good-looking one at that. World of Warcraft is a beautiful 3D game - even for boring "kill X enemies" quests, there can be a lot of enjoyment simply from looking around and exploring the world.
Levels are an amazing skinner box. You want power, they are literally a numeric increment of power, and the way most of these games work you consistently gain them in regular fashion to reinforce the response to play more to get more levels. It is why a game like WoW ended up being magnitudes more successful than Ultima Online, fundamental enjoyability besides, and it is why mobile games are literally Hitler and some can make boats of cash.
Why can a 99 level whatever kill dozens of level 1 charaters effortlessly, by mistake even? Why does it have N times more health? Makes no sense.
One of the first successful MMORPG games was Ultima Online, which didn't have any levels. Just skills. And they didn't matter all that much. Equipment did to a degree, but noone was walking around alone with a +9 weapon for fear of losing it. So it was relatively even.
It was FUN. All areas mattered, even if they didn't have as much variety as WoW. Monsters didn't give XP, so they were mostly killed for resources. And some tiny skill increase, sometimes.