Harvest festival - where's the party?

As you can probably see by my blogging past I haven't been playing wow for much longer than a year so I was quite tickled to see the news item about the harvest festival when I fired up WoW.

So I immediately cleared my non-existing raid schedule, told my guildies to hold on to their hats whilst I dive into the adventure of my first ever harvest festival quest.

The first few steps were promising:

Free food - check
Free drink - check
Funny fireworks - check (ground spinners are fun stuff for about 10 minutes)
quest - check

So off I go to Ashenvale to honor our fallen hero, the mighty former chieftain of the warsong clan who had drank Mannoroth the Demon's blood falling to the taint of corruption.

What in the blazes this could possibly have to do with celebrating the harvest and the end of summer is beyond me but I gave it a pass hoping that the quest would bring something interesting.

lore - semi-check

I should've known right there that things were looking dire but I merrily rode into ashenvale, to the monument dedicated to grom, popped my quest item and got a complete.

So far so good I thought while I jumped on the flyer back to Ogr.

Quest turn in time resulted in a gold or 7 at level 70 and 500 horde reputation... and a book (about 10k xp at lvl 60, less at lower levels but a bit more than a bubble's worth for each of your characters).
No spiffy cutscene of hellscream thanking me for the tribute, no cool items, not even a temporary buff. Supposedly I'll get mailed something in the near future but in the meantime I am just looking at a book that has the approximate resale value of a frozen mudsnapper (I can't even equip it and beat people with it).

What went wrong here? Why would you announce something and call it a festival if there's literally bloody nothing to do beyond the initial quest? No spiffy torch tossing, no dancing around the pole, no whacking some obscure boss for an even more obscure item.... There seems to not be a single repeatable thing in this whole festival.

So Harvest festival was over as quickly as it started. I did the quest on most of my characters just for the sake of some easy xp and rep and went back to my normal routine.

I would've expected at least something repeatable... or a food fight... some cooking quests maybe or at least something to do at the festival place other than tossing fireworks at the people duelling outside of ogrimmar.

Presumably you shouldn't look a gift-horse in the mouth... but when it falls over dead the second you actually get it you do start to wonder a little if you should have.

So whilst I have been more than pleased with pretty much every festival I've see so far this one seems to be lacking a lot in it's implementation and blizzard gets a big 'fail' from me for that one.

Maybe I missed something... anyone know where the party is?