Did Blizzard write themselves into a corner with Cataclysm?

This is purely from a character perspective. Metagame-wise, the story makes sense since the player has progressed through all the vanilla story, then TBC and so on. Then Cataclysm hits and ... what did that do? Did it change the history of your characters or just added new origins for fresh level 1 characters to experience? The latter makes more sense, but then it goes wonky when you arrive in Outland, Northrend and even Pandaria since the Cataclysm (and renewed Alliance/Horde war) supposedly left them unaffected.

So, looking forward, we are expecting future stories to involve the Alliance and Horde collaborating to face a larger threat. I sincerely doubt Blizzard will change or even phase the levelling zones, so we are left with a jarring disconnect where we travel through areas where the war still rages.

My point is, the old vanilla zones may have needed an update, but they should have left their stories and themes intact. These stories were timeless, for the most part (exceptions such as The Missing Diplomat). What they did with Cataclysm was to change the story for the old zones to suit the theme of the expansion, which just seems like a terrible idea to me since that story should conclude with the final patch of that expansion.

Everything seems a little messy, and I fear Blizzard have made their future story development much harder to implement.