Its wild to me that when the topic of a group finder comes up, people always reference WoW. WoWs original group finder was not good at all. It served its purpose because the dungeons in WoW were essentially tuned and gutted down so that almost anyone bashing their head on a keyboard could clear 90% of them.
Everquest had what could be described imo as a near perfect LFG tool, only a lot of players didnt utilize it. It allowed you to:
Auto lists your name, class and level.
Set a note for anything you want to say (specific zones, roles or preferences)
See everyone else who was LFG so if you wanted to start a group yourself you could.
It also allowed GROUPS that were LFG to filter by a customizable level range as well as check off specific classes that you were not interested in.
In the end, you still had to send the tell and have a 1 minute conversation, not sure why we are trying to change something thats already been working for 20 years in the exact game that the building blocks for Pantheon are based on.
Whatever some of the forum members know or do not know about the history. I think we can safely assume that VR is quite well aware of the good things, and some of the less good things, that were done in EQ and Vanguard. Hopefully they will build from that - we can do many things now that may not have been feasible then.