The F2P add-on that is on Curse is up to date. Off the top of my head I think it ends in .18.
The biggest thing in terms of gear is the item scaling now in place, which puts even the lowest quest blues somewhat on par with BIS gear. There are still mostly clear BIS pieces, but the gap between a random green piece of gear and a BIS piece of gear is a lot more narrow. Which is good, because it makes even newer or lesser-geared players more effective, but still gives twinkers something to strive for. Check out the Gear Scaling Index to know what items scale to in the new 20-29 scaling bracket.
As far as the queue times, it's because there are now over twice as many options to choose from, so the total available players aren't all funneled into just two battlegrounds anymore. Plus, there is bonus honor for queueing as random, whereas in the past everyone pretty much only directly queued for WSG and AB was largely ignored except on AB weekends (which don't exist anymore) so looking at it that way, there are now 5 times as many directions people are being pulled (four battlegrounds and yay arenas are back (and they scale) so it only makes sense that queue times are longer. That's the cost of having more options. You can somewhat alleviate this by directly queueing for just WSG if that's all that interests you. For the most part, my queue times are usually under 10 minutes. (That's as Alliance, playing a tank class.)
You might also be interested to know that when 6.1 is released, there's going to be an account-wide BoA tab, which is going to make it much easier to gear up new characters and get into the action. We haven't even begun to really explore or ponder the ways in which this might change the F2P game, but once the PTR goes up with these changes, we'll be able to get a lot more information on this.
Welcome back to the scene.
