See, I don't need a new reason to hate Arthas, there was plenty of that in the game from Day 1. *I liked the world event*, but the people who didn't aren't saying that they hate that there are undead in the world. They're saying that they hated their PvE servers being turned into worse-than-PvP servers. Because, you see, it was very easy to get killed in town, zombified and then killed by a guard, thus incurring a gold cost.

All this talk of lore and in-character concepts is great, but it totally misses the point. This is about people reacting to other people's behavior, and how Blizzard enabled and encouraged it.