I dunno I think you're coming at it with a better level of hindsight than they ever had. Games moved on, WoW came along and shook up the raid scene a ton (then trivialised it to shit)...we look through our "2013 sunglasses" and 1999 content looks uninspiring, flat and even boring.
My memories of raiding Velious/Luclin/PoP saw improvements for sure (though flagging in PoP for me was a bastard as I couldn't attend as many raids as a Euro player on a US server as I'd have liked
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Point taken though, there's no eclipsing CH or a well geared warrior's damage mitigation.