Since Preach asked for this feedback. Here is my current impression of the game as someone who just came back and leveled from scratch. You have walls that Blizzard puts up, the community puts up and wall created by difficulty.
After TBC when they removed attunements and effectively nerfed raids to be casual friendly the community started to step in where they felt Blizzard was failing. It started with achievements and then morphed into gear score. I was there and saw how it was destabalizing servers and saw people quiting in droves who were excluded from content.
The response to raiders who wanted hard content was the Mythic difficulty wall. Preach has complained about this but fails to mention this wall was specifically put there for guys like him. Not all guilds were supposed to see it but this is poorly communicated by Blizzard. I specifically remember patch notes that were pages and page long of nerfs that I no longer see. It was normal to see Heroic raids beat with a nerf bat.
This was normal. All seasons are is moving the below curve. That is all Blizzard does nothing more and nothing less. They decide where they want a majority of the community to be and move the curve there. The community on the other hand responded with Raider IO where the curve does not move. It is a set score that last an entire season and is based on time.
All I see is the same gear treadmill but with more people intervening to either make it easier like Blizzard or harder such as the community. In Vanilla and TBC the one wall was the raid itself with Attunements, resist, gold requirements to respec and raid size.
Things like Titanforge and Warforge throw a wrench into the below system. It takes someone who is unguilded and throws them a piece of 415 loot and sets the expectation that this is normal. In reality that 415 gear would come from you joining a guild and doing Mythic raiding.
Get rid of Warforge or Titanforge that wall is hard and you do not get over it unless you run with a guild. This system has killed more guilds then it has helped in a very backwards way. It has led people to think they no longer need guilds to get over these walls.
Preach the reason you will see noone say anything positive about this system is because of the below walls. You can be wearing all 400 ilvl from Titanforges but if you do not have the correct Raider IO then you are rarely going to pug a +10. You can be wearing all 425 lvl Titanforged gear somehow but if you do not execute mechanics you are not Mythic raiding. Skill is the current gauge used by the community while Blizzard still thinks gear is the cookie. It is but not NEARLY to the extent it has been used as a carrot.