I've been thinking about some of the differences between expertise as it's displayed within WoW, and in the players of WoW.
Thinking about Bereiter and Scardamalia's Surpassing Ourselves, they've got a model of what the difference between an expert and a novice that isn't quite the same as what the theory behind WoW is. I'm going to mangle the B&S model, I'm sure, but at its simplest it seems that expertise is the ability to see patterns, and compose complex responses easily. In WoW, an avatar's experience is equivalent to expertise - more time bashing stuff inexorably advances the avatar's ability. That's routine expertise, though, not the expertise that facilitates the leap to new knowledge.
Controlling the avatar, however, does seem like a more valid study of expertise, and that, sadly, falls back into the realm of non-virtual, human expertise. Talking with my mentor, Ken, about this, his response is that he's met lvl 60 players who still don't understand how to control their avatar well. They don't function well in groups, and they don't understand the nuances of the different roles the classes play - the attempt to play a mage in the same fashion as a warrior, for example.
How can we study player expertise, and avoid the trap of "level awe"? My guess is that we evaluate party member's opinions of the subject player's contributions, but that's just a guess. And dang tricky to control for, too.
Before I got so busy this last week or so finishing up projects for school, I was leveling up pretty quickly. And I noticed one thing right away. While I've figured out that there are strategies for leveling up more quickly(especially for quests - like taking on all the quests from any quests-giver you can see in the population hubs/cities, because chances are you're going to have to kill monsters to get where you are trying to go anyway, and there's sure to be a quest that can be accomplished just through the kills). So that is a kind of expertise - making distinctions in the context of a bigger picture. But for the kills themselves, as you say, it seems one just bashes away. I have no idea whether my stance or how close or far I am from the target gets me further along, it just seems that the more I fight, the more experience points I get. But there isn't a corresponding granular increase in skill that all that experience would provide - at least not so I've been able to figure out (I only hit level 8, but I'm going back in just as soon as I can find someone to guard my corpse from the harpies so I can least get and stay resurrected for more than 1 minute).
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