There
IS an AOE soft-cap. It's 20. And it's currently been in place since MoP, when
before, that soft-cap was 10. It's
still in place for a lot of AOE abilities. There are much fewer uncapped abilities right now on live than there are soft-capped ones.
Also, there's no reason for this to be a one-or-the-other situation. It's completely valid for the new AOE changes to have been put in place for certain abilities both to reduce the prominence of AoE as a meta-defining mechanic
and maybe with the added benefit of putting less stress on servers on the side.
It just sounds more to me like your "non-lazy solution" to the problem of AOE is to not do anything about it. Which is valid, I guess. Not everyone likes these changes, it's clear. I personally don't mind them, especially considering that my main spec, Demonology, has pretty much come out unscathed. But even on the other specs I play that are getting affected, the only thing that's really going to change in my gameplay is my damage numbers in certain situations that probably will happen a lot less now. And that, in itself, is fine. I was never convinced that this would actually heavily upset my gameplay, and I'm still not.
I just kind of wish people would argue about this stuff in better faith. Or at least in better-informed faith. Whenever I see people talking about the AOE changes, they make it sound like every single ability in the game with an AOE mechanic is going to be crunched down to only be able to hit a max of 8 targets, when that's not exactly the case.
For anyone curious or don't know about exactly what's changing or what AOE will look like tomorrow, here:
This is a list of all the abilities that are actually changing.
And this is a list of pretty much all the AOE abilities in the game and how they're capped. Most of the abilities on this list have always been capped this way; it's not a reflection of what's going to be
changing with Shadowlands, just how it'll all look.
Just for clarification's sake.