Sadly, this might be the truth. Maybe Blizzard looked at the data and figured not enough of the ‘old school’ mmo players returned to warrant trying to craft the game around them. So they just attract Retail players with the boost and bleed them dry with cash shop and micro-transactions. The game suffers, obviously. But they’re raking it in.
Still, I’d play if they made a fresh server. In the meantime I’ll go give FF14 a shot. That game is apparently blowing up. They’ve disabled being able to make new characters on almost every server since there’s so many new players. But hopefully I can find one that lets me make one.