Fun is subjective. No MMORPG developer will ever satisfy everyone.
I’ve been playing this game since 2004, have worked for a major MMORPG developer/publisher for over 5 years, and have played WoW since it’s launch. The one thing that sticks out the most for me with EVE Online is the fact a company took a very niche idea and turned it into a profitable product. They even did this in the face of major consumer decline around the time of it’s launch and turned it around to be something pretty epic that sustained a large dev team and many future projects.
World of Warcraft on the other hand, had a extremely large budget, a lot more flexibility, a known IP, replicated many popular game systems from it’s predecessors, offered no real loss, and was set in very popular game setting (e.g.: fantasy versus sci-fi). It pretty much had everything going for it where the only downfall is if the devs failed to execute on all of this correctly, which they did and created an amazing product too.
IMHO it’s really no comparison. EVE Online is David and World of Warcraft was Goliath.