The fact that you started out your defence if them listening to players with professions shoes that they didn’t really listen in the major things
You talk about
1 profrssions
2 legos
3 endless grind
4 “warmode boundaries”
5 ripcord
So professions other that crafting the base lego item are just as irrelevant as ever and even those items I have heard you loose gold by making so are pretty bad anyway
Legos being craft able instead of RNG is actually good yes but let’s look at what else they attached to that. Torgast. When players said they didn’t like forces content like islands blizzard responded with a forced tower instead…
Endless grind. Instead of grinding azerite at our own pace (which was awful) they have out everyone in a time gated renown grind (which still sucks) I will give them credit for making it come from multiple sources although they still force the covenant campaign on you when you swap factuons/have alts etc.
Ripcord. Now this is the big one. This is them finally listening to things that people said would make the game unfun from beta. Let’s run through a few things
Covenant swapping (biggest system in the game)
Soulbind power (then even admitted it was a mistake)
Renown for alts
AoE capping classes.
See how those are way more significant impacts on gameplay than “we want professions to be meaningful” with their answer being “here get 1 crafted lego when you already used a crafted rings/trinket in bfa anyway”
The fact that they are “pulling the ripcord” now rather than in beta is because they didn’t listen not because they did.
Then there are the things they still didn’t listen to. The big bone being forced content.
In 8.0 raiding was mandatory for azerite gear because azerite gear acquisition sucked. What did they do? Add dom sockets lol.
Forced islands/warfronts became forced torgast.