I feel you're being a bit disingenuous with some of your comments. I haven't personally played very many mmos where all classes had all utility spells, nor where you had access to all crating professions on one character. There is still interdependence built into many mmos, but the biggest difference is that it is not a requirement.
In more modern mmos you don't have to have every single buff available to you in order to complete a given task. Honestly, this is a good thing, because the game becomes less about filling holes and not being able to play without the right make up, and more about the business of playing the actual game. Yes, there is still most viable and best set ups for the min maxers, but these are not hard and fast requirements for everyone.
There are far too many of these types of threads where someone falsely attempts to state that X about Y is true, where nothing has really changed aside from the players. Sure it was more difficult to become autonomous in older mmos, but the challenge was still there. Stating that there is a lack of interdependence is the same as stating that mmos are designed to be less social. Both of which are not true. MMOs are designed more or less the same way as they have been for nearly 20 years. Go into a world, run some form of a treadmill to attain more power, play with other folks. The biggest difference of modern mmos is that much of the inherently built in tedium of the older mmos is gone, and many of the older mmos have also removed the built in tedium as well.
TL;DR: It's not the mmos that have changed, it's the players. If people want interdependence (aka social) then they will seek that out individually. The systems are still there, but most people seem to want to be able to play in their own way and attain their personal goals.
I think that you don't understand what youre talking about. Interdependence is not social interaction/being social. Social interactions are a consequence of interdependence. In MMOs interdependence is literary a FORCED COOPERATION i.e. being forced to cooprate - simply because it's impossible for you to do it alone (and i don't mean only killing mobs). Haveing the option to (not)interact/cooperate with someone else makes you no longer depend.
And the big difference is in that social consequence. The way you interact with people you depend on is completely different than social interactions with people you just hang on for a bit of fun. The first leads to much deeper/richer and/or lasting social interactions and emotions (positive or negative).
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I think that you don't understand what youre talking about. Interdependence is not social interaction/being social. Social interactions are a consequence of interdependence. In MMOs interdependence is literary a FORCED COOPERATION i.e. being forced to cooprate - simply because it's impossible for you to do it alone (and i don't mean only killing mobs). Haveing the option to (not)interact/cooperate with someone else makes you no longer depend.
And the big difference is in that social consequence. The way you interact with people you depend on is completely different than social interactions with people you just hang on for a bit of fun. The first leads to much deeper/richer and/or lasting social interactions and emotions (positive or negative).