It’s not a good change for the game. Only out-of-touch gatekeeping purists think so, and many of them won’t even play WotLK because they hate it for other reasons. They are generally the sort of people who insist that any and all changes beyond Classic were automatically bad. The same people also want dual spec gone. We were just unfortunate enough for one of those boomer dads to end up as the lead classic developer.
It is, and community opinion is largely in favour of it.
There’s no objective metric at all for declaring a removal of LFD to be “what’s best”. It’s entire feelycrafting BS, and again it’s a change aimed at appealing to people who largely don’t like WotLK regardless. It’s a hilariously misinformed and idiotic decision to make.
These classic servers are meant to be authentic museum-piece experiences of the original expansions. WotLK had dungeon finder, as should the classic server version. LFG was a good feature because it kept entry-level dungeons relevant. This was especially important since LFD was added in 3.3 and the game would go into a year of no content before Cataclysm. We see in Burning Crusade what happens when forming dungeon groups is tedious: people stop doing them and the whole “social aspect” that they’re apparently trying to preserve disappears.
There’s no direct gauge on the popular opinion on this issue because only Blizzard can get an accurate sample of that and they neglected to ask about this most contentious of issues in any of their email surveys. Either they were stupid enough to believe the community opinion was so one–sided against LFD that it wouldn’t be controversial, or they figured that asking about it in the surveys would give away their intention so they decided to deceive everyone instead. Either way it’s not good.
In any case what we do have is forums including this one and the classic WoW reddit. There are some polls created but, let’s be honest, those aren’t going to be representative samples (that’s good for your side because all the polls are heavily in favour of adding LFD). But notice the sheer volume of pro-LFD posts and the votes in favour of them. They always receive the most likes and positive attention. On the very announcement thread of WotLK classic the first comment saying they should have LFD in WotLK classic has about 8 times as many likes as the announcement post itself.
This looks very similar to the flying debacle in 2015. In that debacle they also got duped into catering to a vocal minority who insisted flying was bad (another terrible take BTW). They started off WoD with no flying, planning to have it in a later patch, and when the voices on the forums still looked about balanced between flying and no-flying (and in fact on MMO-champions most were against flying) Blizzard assumed they were on the right track and revealed that they would in fact never have flying again in the current content.
Well, as it turned out, the majority did like flying and the only reason they weren’t dominating the discussion on the forums was because they were under the impression that they were getting flying soon. When it was revealed that they weren’t and Blizzard sided against them, they all came to the forums at once. I remember back then the forums showed 50 threads on each page and on General Discussion literally the entire front page was all threads demanding flying. The pressure was so overwhelming that they relented.
This looks similar in that for a while it looked on Burning Crusade Classic Discussion and /r/classicwow that anti-LFD was the majority. The people supporting it (like me) didn’t show up because… we were going to get it in WotLK, right? But now Blizzard again sided with the obnoxious purists and it’s clear what the majority actually thinks (pro-LFD).
What you said was “It’s so much better for them to take action that will piss people off than to do nothing and still piss people off.”. That’s an ignorant statement. Because taking the action pisses more people off than not doing it.