I think it boils down to this. If Blizzard overuses sharding at launch… or is tempted to use is more than they stated. People will stop playing.
I would rather not see sharding used at all, but am willing to accept that it may help with the launch stability. For me though if 11,000-12,000 players can be online in a single server on some hosted solution. Then I can’t really understand why Blizzard cannot do it on what must be state of the art servers optimized for MMO activity.
The last Blue post especially reinforces my confidence that they WANT to provide an authentic server based experience:
I don’t think they will use sharding at all unless it is absolutely necessary. And if they do need to… I feel fairly confident that it will only be as much and for as little time as possible.
I do side with the OP in that if this isn’t a fairly accurate reproduction of Classic… i too will bail fairly early on. I cannot stand what WoW has become… and want the WoW I know and love to play. This is as close as I’ll ever come.