People that defend SL have stockholm syndrome lol, their brains have become so numb from grinding the same borrowed power mechanics for years that they can’t understand why people who never bothered playing those expansions would find this one tedious and boring.
The only credit I can give SL is maybe the questing and zones feel great the first time around, but the end game so far is just a reskin of previous expansions and they took ideas from other games (Torgast) but never bothered implementing it properly either.
Not to mention the time gate mechanics are extremely heavy handed and it seems like Ion or whoever is the game dev now wants to force casuals to get into rated PvP and M+ when only a very small portion of neckbeards actually give a $$$$ about those game modes.
Unless they overhaul and fix a lot of the current issues like anima grind, useless mission tables and all the other myriad of broken and $$$$ed up things, I don’t think SL will last that long for a casual player.