Vanilla people were ignorant about WOW TBC Gold anything, especially at the beginning. Do you really believe the vast majority of people were going with their selection in a way based on race? That's ridiculous.
It is obvious that players who were part of the actual cutting-edge PvE raid guilds or PvPers that REALLY were looking to gain every advantage they could get would do that, but those were somewhere around 0,1% or less of the player base.
It didn't matter to everyone else. Of course it might cheap Burning Crusade Classic Gold have looked like much more when you were in this relatively small amount of people.