Because it’s a massive waste of dev time more or less. On top of that, only a small fraction of their ideas end up being interesting, probably in part because it’s always so rushed, and if you give people something that they didn’t want and it’s not even good, they’re going to be unhappy. They took designers, coders, animators, artists, and stuck them on a project to take things that mostly already existed in the game and recode them for a temporary project. They could have been tasked with improvements to existing systems that are sorely needed, new systems that are sorely needed, but no, they get put on the job of adding things to the game that go away 3 months later.
I was fine with seasons when they were something EXTRA, which is more or less how they were touted early on. We were going to have all this great stuff coming to the base game with refinements and additions, and seasons were going to be this neat thing on top to spice things up. Season themes were going to be big and bad and synergize with general improvements to the game. Unfortunately, what we’ve gotten each season has been mostly the borrowed power that will disappear at season’s end, and very weak updates to the core game. We’re almost 2 years in and the pacing is worse, the itemization has barely moved, the scaling and balance are still middling at best, and even our first expansion was only halfway finished.
If they sort out the development cycle and speed it up for real changes that will stay with us, people won’t focus on seasons being lame. They won’t care because the core of the game will be good. Right now it’s not very high quality, which means that players are going to focus on those things that believe are responsible. It could be the case that they’ve got 100 guys on the expansion, another 100 on core updates, and only 20 on each season in their pipeline, but it regularly feels more like seasons are getting the lion’s share of work and they’re not impressive. Something has to change. 