Hey there,
After seeing all the discussions regarding why Blizzard seems to be so out of touch in this expansion, I wanted to share my point of view about what I see as the solution and why.
Let me start by saying that I do not think the problem is developers being incompetent and unable to design a proper expansion. To me the main problem seems to be the strategic decisions that are forced by the upper management of Activision Blizzard. After all, dev team is only there to execute within the given budget and achieve the objectives determined by the senior management.
WoW and MMORPG genre is not the hot stuff anymore and in fact as we all know WoW is way past it's prime. Thus, the game is being treated as the "Cash Cow". What you want to achieve with cash cow type of products/services is you either do not invest at all or invest as low as possible while trying to squeeze out that last bit of revenues before the product/service eventually dies out.
WoW is exactly at that stage where investments are not so profitable anymore but there is still a market that has the potential to bring in revenues. What they are basically trying to achieve is to come up with a game design philosophy that could keep people subscribed for as long as possible while investing in the game as little as possible. So, what better way is there to keep people hooked up other than adding more and more lairs of RNG? Titanforging/warforging, weekly m+ gamble chest and all other RNG based game design has no cost for them to implement, but has the potential to keep people hooked up for a while because you simply cannot be BiS at any given time anymore so you keep farming and farming and farming.
Making the game fun is simply too costly for them at this point and they will not go with that option UNLESS they see a dramatic decrease in their subscriber numbers. Why do you think tier sets are removed from the game? Why do you think we did not get a new talent row or new skills as we hit 120? Because all of these things have their cost, and they are simply trying to minimize their investments in this game.
I really do hope that people will speak with their actions and unsubscribe at this point, because as many other people pointed out, Blizzard will definitely not take actions in the direction we want until they see the decrease in the subscriber numbers.