Thanks for making my point, PvP participation was at it's lowest point ever in WoD, so yeah, that says everything I wanted to say, except you said it.We had it in WoD (you didn't need to do arena to get the good pvp gear there). They removed to give it back as a "reward" to try and force people to do arena, because they weren't popular enough on their own.
The first M in MMORPG means "massively", so it's hilarious that you keep playing that card when trying to defend arena which is anything but. Note that nothing in "MMORPG" means "power progression". It's just some dogma that people derive from the term "RPG", when they kinda fail to understand why RPG were built around artificial power progression in the first place (it was to meet the technical limitations of simulating a world with rolls of dice rather than in a computer)
Arena doesn't belong in an MMO in the first place. Wow is a massive and open world game, and arena is anything but. It was created to try and bring wow into the esport scene in a misguided effort to try and reproduce the success that starcraft had enjoyed in that space, notwithstanding the fact that wow is just not that sort of game in the first place.
This is why arena is fundamentally at odds with what players want out of wow. It doesn't belong. This is why some people feel it should be the exclusive source of proper pvp gear, because they know arena can't stand on its own as something that a lot of people actually want to play.
You say "not rising to the challenge", I say "they didn't want to do arena in the first place". You'll have to do with fewer people who actually want to be here.