The latest stream has me worried about Shadowlands

[Gorsameth]

Ultimately it is no different from 'hey all that Ulduar gear is shit now because ToC is out, oh hey time to replace all your ToC gear because ICC is here! Oh hey, Cataclysm is live, time to replace all your ICC/RS gear with Hyjal greens LOL."

The game has always been about temporary incremental power gains that we eventually discard and replace. Literally always. Even the legendary items that we spend an entire raid tier/expansion grinding out. Wrathion's cloak. The rings from WoD. Hundreds of Legion legendaries. The artifacts. All of it.

These recent progression systems, however annoying they can be (and I fully admit that some of them are exactly that) are just a different spin on the same thing.

The difference is that you just needed to gather the latest gear.
In BFA you still need the gear but you also need to get Essences, the correct Azurite Pieces, Cloak and Corruption. The only thing you more or less 'skip' is AP itself because of the instant boost for doing the start of Naj'zatar.

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Looking at Classic and TBC, that is false, Loot from previous raids lasted way longer into the next because not everything was a straight upgrade.

Dps Warriors for example use the Belt from Ragnaros until Naxx and that is by far not the only example.

Great if you have it and like using it. Horrible if you don't have it and no one else wants to go back to MC to farm you your belt. They already spend 6+ months in there and want to spend their time in the latest raid instead.

That said, I do agree that the jump in ilvl between tiers is to big now and could be brought down a lot.

[Kralljin]

Great if you have it and like using it. Horrible if you don't have it and no one else wants to go back to MC to farm you your belt. They already spend 6+ months in there and want to spend their time in the latest raid instead.

Obviously, it is one of the more extreme examples, but the point here was "there was a time where not every piece was replaced each tier".

[Raisei]

I think you're wrong in assuming that Retail gets a bigger budget because of the success of Classic.

Like, they're not idiots, and Blizzard will not mindlessly assign a bigger budget for Retail because Classic raked in additional revenue.
Both need to justify their budget on their own.

Heck, i could even see the higher ups knocking at their door and ask the devs why a 15 year old code, made functional by a few software engineers rakes in so much money, meanwhile Retail having big development costs due to having a team made up by over 60 heads.

Especially if the President of the company touted "You think you do, but you don't" a few years ago.

The beauty of the system is that it is the same sub, so the success of Classic is the success of Retail. But you are probably right that it will not get more budget because of that.
However, the company is financed by the sub money (in part) so in essence all the content is paid for by that money.

[Kralljin]

The beauty of the system is that it is the same sub, so the success of Classic is the success of Retail. But you are probably right that it will not get more budget because of that.

That's how Blizzards presents things to the shareholders / World, but most certainly not how they handle it internally.