In that expansion I'm sure you're talking about, paladins are somewhat better, and shamans are worse. That's normal, and it's not a problem when you play in live servers, since they are making modifications to spells and everything constantly. But when you're stuck in some version, then, you're stuck with how classes work in that version forever. That makes the population lean towards one class.
More information about FOTM here: http://wowpedia.org/Fotm
Server only handles chat (via hybrid-ircd, I think?), and via the main daemon (which seems like it might have been Lua-based at one point, or at least link into it like the client does), state coordination including item looting, and creep behaviour. Creep/boss behaviour and looting have been studied closely enough by tactically-minded players to be effectively black-box reverse-engineered, and fully reimplementable to a high degree of fidelity and precision.
(I'm not going to do it, I quit a while ago, but I did make a pretty popular addon, and did look into things a bit.)