@tundra-793 K, so after sifting through the rest to find yours, I came across finding out you did not play the classics of any of them and instead played the "Dumbed down" versions. So allow me to educate you on the games you used as examples.
Ultima online, to raise stats or "Grind" as you called it, you had to live your character's life. So that meant, to raise a specific stat, you had to devote yourself to multitude of job professions that the game offered you and in no way was it a grind it was a player choice. To raise profession stats required subprofessions, which once more were player choice so ultima online had no grind, outside of doing tedious thing such as spirit speak to raise intelligence. Stats were capped at a hardcap to prevent people from having maxed out everything, so everyone was either different, or following guides. Basically? It let you be what you wanted to be and the only grind was forged by yourself, not the game.
Everquest, by far one of the hardest and most brutal games to level in existence(In the past) it took ages just to get to level 10, but you felt a feeling of accomplishment when you did. It actually required teamwork to take on orc centurions in a camp, or taking down skeleton bishops on the checkard board, hearing people shout "BOAT!" as you scurried down the zone line trying to make the boat or end up waiting 30 minutes for another, but I won't deny the game was a grind. However, I will say that the grind was rewarded with not only gear, not only stats, but also the accomplishing feeling of "Now I'm strong enough to do this." Which SoT is lacking, completely.
WoW, I cannot say much about WoW, I played vanilla, up to around a lvl 42 warrior at the start and the game was semi broken for warriors at that point and at no point did it feel like a grind. The game had multiple quest varieties, dungeons to do, tradeskills to perform, could goof off in town, battlegrounds didn't exist etc.
All in all, your examples don't make much sense to me. You compared MMO's which have a longer grind for a much better pay out, to SoT which has a monotonous grind of doing the same three things over and over for 0 pay out other than looking snazzy. That is why I said I don't understand.