OK, I hate to get into this argument really because I think the OPs topic was about introducing a fast R14 axe to Era specifically, and I don’t see that as needed for Era. Especially if the Era players focus on speed clears, and from what I’ve seen they do, and the Era horde has great clear times.
Without knowing a single detail about the next season I do think a R14 fast axe may be a good idea there, depending on everything.
SoM was also not that popular, especially after a few months and I’ve written my list of reasons for that. By the time the horde got to AQ40, there were so few horde raiders that a skill issue may have contributed to the lack of clears.
However, after playing SoM, even though I never played that version to raid, I will say that there were some benefits huge enough to the alliance that the raiding players picked that faction for SoM from the start, or rerolled to it. The horde had a number of disadvantages based on the tweaks to the SoM version of the game. While this may be a chicken (the “best” players pick one faction based on them being better for min-maxing) and egg (all the “better” or mid-tier players follow), I’ll say this is more of a chicken.
I admittedly was not paying attention to AQ40 SoM so I don’t know about there. I don’t really want to call it this but I will, one of the better horde guilds in Era right now was raiding in SoM up to Naxx. If no horde guilds cleared the AQ40 hard modes that would mean they didn’t either. That’s despite my knowing that some of those players understand Classic Vanilla very well. Likely all 40 were not great though, and they had to take what they could get. I don’t know.
I will agree with this more because it’s been my experience. The people who have seen who are very good at and hugely into things like speed running and parsing are still very much enjoying progressing through the Classic releases and will probably love Cata. Everything about that game fits them like a glove.
With that being said there are die-hard Vanilla fans who are good at the game, even based on your explanation of what good is, did play SoM, and I’d say even more of these types will play the next season.
On another note, I do find it interesting that “good” is determined mostly by a persons passions. The people who I know who do the “best” in this game will sit on class discords all day, or sometimes just experiment with their class, and when they find out something new they will get extremely excited. As in you could hand them $1000 and they care about this WoW discovery more. They will also spend hours chatting about it, fully deep diving. Therefore it’s no surprise that when someone is this passionate that they will be good at what they are passionate about, in fact, it naturally follows.
So when a person is good at playing their class very well or figuring out ways to speed clear, or whatever they get really respected by the WoW community. Whereas people who care about other facets of the game and are just as passionate about those things are often thought of as “bad”. The thing is this is perception only, it’s just different personality types and different interests/passions. So because so much focus is put on those who care about one facet of the game (by the devs and increasingly more of the player base) everything becomes about that, which directly means that some of the players who care about things like PVP or the social aspects get left behind, even when these players are drastically better at these things than the players labeled “good” are.
Some of those really amazing players I described would grey parse a 2 in people skills, and this is an MMO. That’s far from “good”. When you try to talk to them about things like how people are working together socially in a raid group it’s like their eyes glaze over. They have no interest in caring even about things that could tear their raid group apart.
This is what I think has happened to Wrath and Retail. Having the game be only about one thing, and treating only one type of player as “good” is extremely bad for a quality MMO IMO. This is way off-topic for this thread and it really seems like no one ever wants to talk about it but since the thread kind of gets into it but I wanted to type those last paragraphs anyway.
So I guess, back to the actual topic, my opinion is no to the R14 fast axe for Era but maybe for the next season.