At my day job we work a lot with cloud vendors for the purposes of building Software as a Service applications. It seems a little outdated that the Blizz dev team has these big bang patches instead of releasing small patches continuously. No judgement, just observation.
During the pandemic many software firms that were on agile release schedules thrived. I wonder if perhaps smaller but more frequent updates would provide more content and allow better testing of the gameplay. If a system isn’t working it could be changed quickly. If something is working, double down on releasing more content like it.
On the flip side, too many patches that are not well communicated with the customer can have its downsides. I am talking about you Windows Update.
Lastly, one of the big things about cloud development is resiliancy. It would be very nice if the Blizz devs incorporated that into their servers so restarts were never required. Its the 21st Century after all.
I wish the Blizz dev team all the best. Hire some programmers, product owners, and dev ops staff, who can do a good job. Its worked well for other tech companies during this time. Costs a lot less to modernize your platform than to keep paying legacy devs to maintain. Automation is key.
The problem is if you knew how the sausage was made you’d probably stop buying it.
In this case it’s like 600 devs all working on various projects not specifically the one you’re spending your hard earned money on.
" Many of our best developers are now working on new mobile titles across our IPs,"
Says it all really. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out maybe 10 people were working on 9.1 and one person was focused on the world content.
They brought us to a local sausage factory as a field trip in like the 4th grade. You are right, I still don’t eat it decades later, and some of my classmates I kept in touch with don’t either. Just you mentioning it brings back the smell… 
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I think it makes perfect sense from blizzards end. Their focus is on maximizing profits and they don’t achieve that by necessarily maximizing product.
Having large patches is better for hype, and it seems likely that most of their revenue is driven from those short term sub bumps. You can build hype, get a bunch of people to sub for 2 months, maybe sell them a 6 month mount bundle and a token or two, maybe a some people forget to cancel their sub, and then it doesn’t matter anymore until the next large patch.
Releasing things iteratively wouldn’t build as much hype and probably wouldn’t lead to as big of a short term revenue bump. It would probably retain more subs over time, but that doesn’t necessarily lead to more revenue than getting people with a bunch of cash shop sales while they’re all gassed up for a new patch.
6 month sub mounts disagree with this and blizz does to.
Agile development is cool for things that can support it. Most games cannot. While I do think they could bring out new BGs or this and that, but when power levels shift from which content is the newest, that puts a wrench in the cog.
That is why they switched to set seasons, to keep powers in line.
I am certain that WoW development is using Agile just based on job descriptions and the way PTR develops with weekly builds. And I think the reasons you give above are all good arguments as to why. I will point out that server restarts are fairly infrequent and since the Patch release there have been hotfixes every day without any restarts needed. Also, if you were paying attention to the launcher in the weeks leading upto the patch, you would have noticed that back-end systems and other data was being downloaded/installed longer before patch day.
Interestingly, the servers are almost never brought down for Expansion releases anymore. I think what is happening is that the server restarts have to occur because the new patch data is being applied to an existing zone. If players were allowed to be logged on when the patch dropped, there would certainly be major issues when a zone is trying to update with players still interacting with it.
I think this explains why Expansion launches don’t need server outage too. Since the new content is in a separate world instance, it can be deployed without any chance of a player being in that zone. And the “global launch” is just enabling a single quest.
The other thing to consider is that the game architecture is 16+ years old at this point. There may be some limitations about what data can be updated live and what cannot.