You know, I think Garrisons might have been one of the first times they bragged that a feature was only ever intended to exist for that one expansion. I get it. I get that you want expansions to have selling features but if you have something really cool and new every expansion and plan to support it forever, there will eventually be too many features to support and the game is going to collapse under that feature creep.
However, never having anything continue forward creates its own problem and we've definitely experienced massive diminishing returns on the idea as selling points. No one's excited about a selling point they know isn't going to matter for more than two years maximum.
Also, World of Warcraft isn't the only place I've been seeing it recently, but there also seems to be a problem of thinking that the only thing that has worth is something that catches on right out of the gate. Again, I get not throwing good money after bad, but we've also had so many interesting ideas with flawed executions seemingly abandoned because of the flawed execution, instead of just fixing the execution and making them beloved.
I mean, I know it's a controversial opinion, but out of all the Mission Tables, my favorite is still the original Garrison one. Why? Because there was so much variety in it. Sure, to guarantee the endgame missions you were still encouraged to min-max and prioritize special characters, but there were a million followers and traits and the whole thing had so much flavor. Nowadays it feels like the Mission Tables are there just to fill some quota. I don't care which generic Kyrian and Venthyr I'm sending on a generic mission. I'm not sending Garona who I have trained to Dance and Love Ogres, which actually meant something to me, even if the gameplay side of it was still set and forget.