Emotional attachment to vanilla characters

I have leveled up my undead warlock to level 60. I have run all the level 50+ dungeons, collected most dungeon upgrades, done dozens of battlegrounds, seen over 1000 honorable kills, finished my class quest for my epic mount, killed Onyxia, Ragnaros and Nefarian and found a few epic set items. My total played time is over 18 days. And yet I think I am not attached to my character. How come?

Does that epic gear make this character worth more to my eyes?

I know that I am not fond of my character for a couple reasons. First, I find its gameplay bland in PvE as the main thing I am doing is casting shadowbolts and a curse. This is even more noticeable because encounters do not require much movement, thinking or adaptation*. This lack of challenge also means that I did not encounter many hardships playing my warlock (as an example elite quests while leveling consisted of fear-shadowbolt-fear, simple and easy) and hardships build a relationship between the player and the character. 
  
Then, I feel like I have no particular importance to my raid partners, as a lone dps among 40 players I am mostly expendable. This belief expands into how I look at my character (a random warlock of low importance) and this is likely a reason why I much prefered playing healer in 10 man raids on retail. I dislike being one among too many as I feel as if each individual's personality gets lost.

Standing out from the crowd : tanking Onyxia

Also, historically I have played on many private servers where character wipes sometimes happened and of which almost all got discontinued, which has lead me to not care too much about what happens to my characters and take things as they come. Saying I distrust most servers would be inaccurate, I am incredibly skeptical of the survival of most private servers. And as such I voluntarily prevent myself from doing superfluous things like collecting random items, or trying to have a server's best damage on a boss fight, which could further increase my investment in my character and my fear of losing those (loss aversion).

Likely the very first server I stayed a long time on. Its community can still be found here and there but the server is no longer running.

But maybe the main reason is much easier to grasp... I never thought I would play long-term on this server. I thought of it as a thing to try, a short experience, but not more.

Thus unfortunately for all I have heard about vanilla making you care more about your character, it did not work for me.

*Actually you could do exactly that and try to find every possible smallest way to increase your damage on a fight or decrease the damage you take, but I take no pleasure in doing 5% more damage making lots of efforts when simply getting a flask, a dragonslayer buff or being a rogue could bring 10-30% more and in most cases regardless of my damage the boss still dies.

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