"Respect players time" is still one of the biggest jokes ever.
I'm not trying to defend the developers very often, but I still do think that Shadowlands' quality/execution in particular (and reception in return) mainly suffered from the whole Covid situation stacked on-top of all the pre-existing conceptual issues of the game and structural issues of the company. For an afterlife-themed expansion, I fully expected re-re-re-re-re-.....recycling of all those deceased characters who were ever part of a well-received storyline to be their prime motivation and was actually somewhat pleased by how they didn't go fully mental with that.Overall, though: With Blizzard turning all their other franchises/games into short-term record profits/long-term reputation disasters, they should realize that WoW as a really, really old game is in dire need of far greater investments into maintenance and development right now to keep alive. The game has really suffered from decades of cutting content patches, system/gameplay innovations, zones, raids, dungeons, arenas, battlegrounds, reducing new art assets, meaningful player choices, legacy content maintenance, internal testing and overall scope of expansions/patches. The past 12-14 years (with the exception of Legion, to notable degree) really felt like Blizzard wanted to finally axe the game by investing fewer and fewer ressources the further subscrition numbers went down instead of defying the trend.Dragonflight felt like a first step into the right direction in terms of richer, more stable content delivery, but I'm not the least bit surprised by how that didn't result in rising subscription numbers – more, A LOT MORE, will be required in order to restore the game to an attractive level. There's also no guarantee this will save the game long-term and Blizzard have only their own cost-cutting to blame for that.
Having 7+ million subs as it was at peak Legion is huge, especially so late into expansion.
Hot take: I enjoyed/played Shadowlands more than Dragonflight