The pop culture references were always present in WoW, though. Suppose it was made a bit worse in Cataclysm, at least for the Alliance parts of the revamp. Will see how much people enjoy the journey when you lose a lot of direction at 30-45. Reading comments about this on other forums people bandy about 'immersion' so much, I'd think they were talking about a Bethesda game.
Not sure what's with the excessive nice behaviour, must be some weird conformist thing where everyone has to buff everyone they can and I keep having strange people trying to offer me gear. Definitely not the WoW community I know, hopefully it returns to normal.