Why would they lie about something their metrics show were unpopular?
People always look for conspiracies when banal explanations will suffice: they were resource intensive (like all story content) and not very popular (as shown by their internal metrics).
Lots of folks like to wishlist stuff, which to some extent I understand, but creating story stuff is very inefficient compared to making a dungeon or raid or pvp arena people will use over and over again. Most people do story stuff once and then want to skip it on alts. Now obviously some version of that content is necessarily, especially at the start of an expansion, but it's a huge black hole of resources.