I still find your evident distaste for the character to be superfluous – and mind you, I otherwise find you to be someone with very good judgment and sense, and I can't help but agree with many of your other opinions – and it frankly strikes me as a tad unfair. I at least believe I understand the origin of it, but I think it's a tad extreme and vastly inflates a particular quality of the character. Either way, I figure that the reason he didn't appear was more on account of his association with the Lightforged and Lordaeron taking primacy over any association he has with Stormwind. It seems like the point was to emphasize the (much too recent, much too truncated, much too limited in scope) history of Stormwind and its people, a facet in which Turalyon has no involvement. I personally find him far more tolerable than the likes of Anduin, and I hope to see him more often—but happenstance leaves us in agreement that it was good he didn't play too much of a role in this, as something so exclusively focused on Stormwind isn't his place.
re: the questline not being terrible, on that I also have to ardently disagree. I found it fairly insufferable due to the aforementioned derailment of Vanessa's character, and this really wasn't helped by the extraordinarily stilted dialogue. I have no clue how it came out this way, since the dialogue lately has been significantly less terrible than this, so I'm shocked we're back to Shadowlands-tier (nearly sub-Shadowlans-tier) dialogue. Back on the primary topic, I think she lost a great deal of depth, and it was a great shame.