Originally Posted by
MoanaLisa
It's likely that his primary job is to manage the various teams, keep up with what's going on, keep everyone on schedule, work with the producers when problems arise, hold meetings, get consensus on what they're designing, and generally do what managers everywhere do. He's probably very good at that. Once in a while on Twitter you'll see someone mention about how supportive he is. As well, of the "name" higher end managers that have been there for a while, he's of the few that came out of the recent stuff clean.
That's a decent reason to keep him around from Blizzard's perspective. If you imagine that he manages every little detail of the expansion or spends a lot of time doing design that's likely not the case. Mostly I would think he's in meetings.
They kept Chilton around for years after Cataclysm so failure in an expansion is not likely a criteria. Game directors are a lot more than that.
Fun fact: When GC was pretty much the face of WoW, Chilton was game director and stayed out of the conversation. We all know how that turned out. GC was a terrible human being; Chilton was rarely if ever mentioned. WoW's so-called community is all about shooting the messenger.