Originally Posted by
mvallas
I don't believe Pandaria was a knee-jerk reaction. Going from Stupidly hard Firelands and stupidly-hard time consuming Troll dungeons to the Dragon Soul patch is FAR more indicative of a "knee jerk" ship jump.
It's easy to nerf content and playability in one quick swoop. It's a whole other thing entirely to graphically develop an ENTIRE new content, race, architecture, lore, questline, voices, animations and goodness knows what else. That takes time.
Pandaria was clearly a planned thing. If anything - i go back to my old belief. I believe that during Wrath (2008) the dev team saw Kung Fu Panda and Metzen said "Hey! We've been looking for an angle to use the Pandaren in WoW forever... and look how well that movie did! That, combined with Avatar's popularity (animated series, not the blue aliens) PROVES there's an audience that would accept them! Lets put out a Pandaren Monk pet and Action figure and we can see further that they'll be accepted!"