Seriously.
There's no real old guard left.
Pretty much everyone on the Dev team now started out as a player.
From Ion to Christie Golden, all of them were and probably still are players of the game.
So every time you say "well the players need to be in charge." They are.
Doesn't mean that I'm super thrilled with the direction of the game (narratively I feel it's far too focused on characters rather than making the world more amazing and letting us discover it.) Just that current Blizz is farmed from the community itself.
As it stands every game studio with someone age 25 to 50 in it has WoW players whether current or former in every single level of development and management.