Maybe. But it’s giving Bliz more credit that their track record indicates.
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For all their flaws, I have to say that they have put far more effort into culture building since Dragonflight. They have done pretty well with making the Earthen feel distinct from the Dwarves, and with fleshing out ancient dragon history. It is honestly a great irony we know more about the culture of the Maruuk Centaur tribes than we do most playable races.
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As a RPer, I can ignore not knowing much about the PC races cultures. Each race has a pretty solid foundation that allows one to write or RP whatever they like.
It doesn’t bother me much really. Infact, I often tend to forget it’s a thing until someone mentions it 
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As someone who has spent actual time drawing out more logical cosmological charts and how a less bothersome alternate shadowlands might work… I am right there with ya. Blizzard’s lore is historically a skeleton with vague hints of what the person it belongs to might look like, so it is up to players to imagine the fully realized rendition. Or sometimes choose to ignore their really poor decisions for their own enjoyment’s sake.
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That last part? I know people who do exactly that. There’s a lot of horrible lore decisions I will never recognize or even entertain while RPing.
If it detracts from me having fun, it gets ignored. 
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Kail, do not even get me started on my many big issues with the WoW cosmology chart, and this weird moral relativism Blizzard tries to sometimes go with for it, but only half-heartedly.
“Oh, none of the forces are objectively good or objectively evil, because morality is subjectives!!!”
Yeah, I too have read any kind of religious deconstruction book about relative morality.
But when one of your primal forces has the stated goal of destroying all of everything to create something new? I don’t care about “objective morality”. It’s evil. Done.
And it’s totally fine to have your cosmology have forces that are “evil forces” but have good wielders of that force!! It’s very much fine!! Do not have make-believe “objective moral relativistic neutrality” bullcrap to try and justify it.
The void can be absolutely evil and that is okay and doesn’t mean void elves and shadow priests are evil!!!
… And I got started anyway.
I shall stop now.
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I am totally fine if my cosmic forces are ambivalent by nature, personally. But, it takes much more nuance and careful planning then blizzard has done. Their issue is their cosmology was designed with objective good and evil, but then they realized they had effectively cut opportunities off and, instead of embracing the creative limiters they had, they elected to just… ignore them.
Headcannon Stuff you can totes ignore...
Within my personal reframing for the cosmology, everything hinges around three top tier progenitors: The Creator (Arcane), The Sustainer (Light), and the Destroyer (Void). Then its layers down from there based on how those three domains interact with one another to get the other three forces, and then the Great Dark. All three of the Outer forces are important for the grand cycle, but that does not mean they are friendly or good to be directly exposed to. Alas; that is just my little thought experiment, I suppose.
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Well that and they developed the cosmology piecemail, without thought over what force would do what, or how they interacted.
Like, take Light for instance. What’s it really do in practice, like the most common form we see it in? Healing and purification (usually on living things). AKA: What Life should be doing.
Void and Fel have some weird connection, where fel beings frequently employ Void Walkers and similar creatures… Because!!
And Arcane is Order. But Mages, people using Arcane energies, can dabble into Fel energies and become warlocks, death energies and become necromancers, but… Not Light, Life or Void? That seems kinda un-orderly.
The primary opponents of the Old Gods (Void) are the Titans (Order), while the guys always having out back against the Burning Legion (demons of Disorder) are usually the Naaru (Light)? Did someone get confused who they were supposed to be opposed to, and nobody corrected them?
And again, I could always keep going. I could fill an entire thread going back and forth just with myself about the issues that cosmology chart and choices made about it bug me.
But at the end of the day, I try to just sit back, not think about it too much, and enjoy the ride.
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Makes more sense if you envision them as alignment analogs for D&D’s 2e Cosmology, which is likely exactly what they were initially. The Burning Legion (CE) is then opposed by The Light (LG).
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There are still 3, to me it would have a lot more impact on the mixxing views they would want to show if there was a lot more with that model.
But there is nothing to spoil here.
Thats wrong, they did not ALWAYS do this, look at the Mogu, look at the Zandalaari, they did it right.
Its my point, it was a ruin which mean it was not from scratche since you have the vision and you can always use the stones that are here.
Its the case for many big cities that used stones from other cities that were here before but were ghost towns or in ruins.
It was still not from scratche, since it was in ruin which mean it was still here, even if destroyed, its the point i am making.
How you know that? And i mean, how they did not need money? Not to mention that they did not do trade with Earthen after some points.
And found ressources in Hallowfall? I did not see many trees here.
That dont work as a proof.
How much you ready to bet?
The name is here to solidify the character, and its a famous human name related to the original Stromguard times, you can spam me its no longer stromguards but arathi;, but they exactly use a name with the main character of said arathi who have a relation with the og Stromguard.
And they are not less human than Garithos, or Terenas.
Even the one you mention Gathios - Garithos its like same.
Lets be honest, you take what the Arathi says in that dungeon, and you take what Ansurek says, there is no differences.
And well, the “arathi” who fought them, be certain that the Empire will be same as these in dungeon.
But he was not talented at all! You just try to make him sound awesome.
So where is the elven culture then?
The work they did with the Nerubians was great, when you check around you can find a lot of stories about their previous queens and the chain of successions of their queens and what they built etc…
A lot of the confusion, IMO, is that they are trying to retroactively separate “light” from “order” and “darkness” from “chaos”. But they have had limited ability to disentangle them (or mudded thinking). So, for example, the Titans (order) see only one possibility but the ones that see “all posibilities” are not their opposites in disorder, but the Void Lords in “darkness”?
Life/Death has been pretty clear. Though it doesn’t help that, with Callia, the claimed that making undead had nothing to do with death magic.
I think, if they had thought more clearly, they would have simply said that “light” was neutral with respect to “life” and “death”. And so could use either kind of magic.
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They’re not humans
And yet they are still there. Now imagine how many more they must be in the Empire proper.
There is everything to spoil if the story isn’t complete yet, which TWW’s story is not.
Those civilisations are thousands of years old. All of the examples I gave were rebuilt or created within the past 40 in-universe years.
It was still rebuilt after being razed, unlike Old Town, is my point. Old Town’s lore is literally that it didn’t have to be rebuilt.
What would they need money for? They were alone until they met the Earthen, you can facilitate trade through means beyond money. We literally do that in game when we arrange trading routes for them.
Minerals and the plentiful amount of trees.
They had to massively scale down the entire world, if that’s not proof, I’m not sure what is. As the game’s engine improved, they made cities bigger because they could without breaking the game.
The most important figure in terms of their faith, an off-shoot of the Church of the Holy Light, which high elves also followed even when they were at their most isolationistic.
And you can take that up with Blizzard, not me.
Yes, what of it? I’m not defending what the Prioress said.
Why would it be? The Prioress made it clear that in order to first conquer the world, they had to conquer their enemies at home, and given how the rest of the Hallowfall Arathi reacted, well. Why would the Empire be similar to the Priory Arathi? They’re clearly outliers.
He’s an apprentice mage that managed to teach himself teleportation and portal magic. That’s an extremely talented mage.
Part of the Arathi? I’m not sure what to tell you, the high elves themselves were members of the Church of the Holy Light.
The Nerubians are also a chief focus of this expansion while the Arathi Empire will be featured in a latter expansion. It’s called building up.
While there are some similarities, they’re not a copy-paste of the Imperium and while there are some plot holes, perhaps they’re not as bad as you say.
The Army of the Light from Legion - made up mainly of Lightforged Draenei - are more like Space Marines than the Scarlet Crusade ever was. If anything, they’re like Dark Angels. The Lightforged Draenei are your standard Space Marines, Lothraxion is like the Watchers in the Dark, the Man’ari Eredar are the Fallen and Xe’ra is/was their Primarch Lion El’Johnson.
One of the Lightforged Draenei even lifts a quote from Warhammer 40k. And yet I didn’t see people fanboying or fangirling over the Army of the Light/Lightforged Draenei for that reason.
The Arathi, and also humanity in WoW, have a wide range of skin tones. The main Arathi character, Faerin, is black (or at least mixed and mostly black).
I think that’d be cliche and a bad idea.
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There is room for both.
When the shaldorei were a thing, they had a mix of bad and good.
Same with these … Rock Head Earthen
And the same with these… Arathi remnants …
Ultimately, I think there is room for various opinions within the folk of a Faction and a Race.
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Aye, just look at the goblins. We are capitalistic and greedy folks but we got the ones that want to create unions and better health care and we got the gallywix version, the Blizzard CEO types that leech everything for their own personal gains and leave without caring out their people.
It always makes me laugh when big corporations make stories about capitalists or big corporations being villains and say not to trust them. The irony! 
It always is funny isn’t it.
Mages with the ability to create portals on their own don’t grow on trees. The mage in question DID eventually develop the ability, but then things happened.
Did you not play Mists of Pandaria and see how fast we whipped up a castle and several towers in Lion’s Landing? That’s a trivial issue.
Plenty of reasons on both sides… The Earthen were having their own problems and the Arathi had the Nerubi keeping them rather occupied.
They favor their human sides, which is not surprising given that they’re more like 7/8 Human as opposed to being truly 50/50, compare them to Arator who is a true half-elf.
And again the elven mount is the hawkstrider, not the lynx. Althoughy a fair number of Quel’thelan elves probably have lynx pets. Narratively, we’ve had enough tauren riding those frail birds already.
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