You need to remember that when EQ first launched almost all the players had never played an mmo before. There was no consolidated source of information like there is today (the wiki), people were on dial up connections, it was 1999 and the internet wasn't even totally accepted by mainstream society.
Imagine rolling as a level 1 character in this environment. Imagine rolling a shaman, getting to level 5 and trying to figure what spells you need to buy or that you can even BUY new spells. Every single game mechanic needed to figured out and learned, every single class and their role needed to be figured out and learned. People who say EQ "isn't hard" take all of this for granted today. Back then a very small proportion of the population even used the internet, let alone knew how to play games. Today peoples grandparents are playing games on tablets.
Then along comes DAoC (which is way, way harder and more competitive than EQ could ever have hoped to be. In fact no pve game even holds a candle to daoc in terms of "hardness"). In DAoC I pretty much intuitively what each class would do, how to play the game, how to spec (to a certain extent), so starting seemed "easier".
Now comes WoW. I had mastered how to play MMOs by this point. At launch I knew what every classes role was and how to spec them, how to gear them, how to work the economy, how to form a group, how to lead a raid, all of this from launch. Yes some of the encounters were "difficult" but once you'd beat them they became "easy".
In conclusion, what I *think* people mean by difficulty is that when EQ was out none of us knew what we were doing and had to learn how to play games. When WoW launched we were MMO masters and could easily burn through content.
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