For the last couple expansions it feels to me that the... gimmickyness of dungeons has begun to tick up to a point where it's no longer about "have gear, smash your numbers against the bosses' numbers, loot upgrades," but more and more outside the box mechanics.
I just got a good look at what's being asked of players in some of the shadowlands dungeons, and this trend continues. More and more "do the thing and we're all screwed if one guy doesn't do the right thing" stuff that's not related to power or getting out of the bad, and you know... before my late-cataclysm-to-late-WoD hiatus, this would have concerned me, because I used to be a "dungeon guy," who sought his daily loop in 5-man content.
But since legion, that hasn't been true. It hasn't been true for all of BFA, and it it's not going to be true in shadowlands. And... that's been, and will be perfectly ok.
Since WoW started to design dungeons around "The MDI needs to be fun to watch," they have simultaneously added more systems and lanes of content to outright replace "the casual dungeon run." Between world quests, emissaries and timewalking vendors, I have fed up to 30 alts "good enough" gear without needing a single normal or heroic dungeon run for two expansions. I pretty much do not touch anything with groups assembled by the community, because I almost always don't have to, and I honestly don't feel like I'm missing anything. I say this to set up my key point: There have been very few "mandatory dungeons" since legion. The dungeon quests for the leveling game were off to the side of the main story, for both Legion and BFA. There were some in the class hall campaigns in legion, and the one mandatory dungeon in the launch phase was SoB for alliance, it was mythic only, and honestly... it was the singular "suck it up and stress for an hour" period of the expansion for me. I haven't felt compelled to run a dungeon outside of story advancement since.
And again, that's ok. That's potentially intentionally on their minds as they design "if someone does the maze wrong we all start over" mechanics like we're going to see in Shadowlands. Quite clearly, this isn't "everyone will grind this" content any more because Torghast and the Maw and other such things will compete for our time. The weekly chest will apparently reward based on the sum of weekly activities.
So I guess I pose the question here: Are dungeons potentially becoming more complex because they're becoming way more optional (in a fully optional game we all play for fun of course), with all the new parallel systems getting introduced each expansion?