I got news for you. Ladder availability isn’t tied to the patch content, it’s tied to the database being stable and not causing the myriad issues like it did this week (and continues to do so thanks to the all caps issue causing keybinds to be entirely broken). They could nix the 2.4 content, release ladder ASAP, and find that the game as a whole becomes unplayable due to the database issues being unresolved.
They need to fix the database problems before they release the 2.4 patch or start a ladder season. Players are chomping at the bit to get at that content update and the influx of players would absolutely destroy the ability to play with an unstable database. What worries me is that PezRadar’s post implies that they aren’t exactly rushing to fix the caps problem with the character names, which is problematic because that’s what is causing the keybinds to not stay saved anymore due to the associated files being for characters with lower case letters in their names but Battle.net has changed them to all uppercase, causing a character name to filename mismatch.
If you think players are going to stick to the game with broken keybinds, you’re sadly mistaken.