Originally Posted by
Osmeric
I suggest you have the cause and effect reversed. The game saturated the market, and the devs, looking to retain the players who were quitting, and who were overwhelmingly casual, made the game more like what those players wanted (and less like what the devs, being hardcores themselves, wanted.)
The notion that most players have been hardcore flies in the face of all evidence, from completion stats, from what happened when the devs tried to go back to hardcore (in Cataclysm), and from the experience in other MMOs that tried to be hardcore.