I think you have captured the community feedback pretty well. I wanted to make a couple points that I feel are significant and are not getting enough attention:
LFD could help alleviate or fix:
- Access to leveling dungeons (8-65)
This is sort of an amalgamation of your first two summary points, but bears its own point I think. Low-level populations are low currently and are likely to continue to be low, so for those people who do not want to buy (or cannot afford) a paid boost (or ingame dungeon boosting), you have a binary access issue to low-level dungeons (left w solo questing only ). This is especially an issue when leveling is such a significant part of Classic. People leveling today have a wildly different experience from those who leveled at launch years ago and just don’t have the same access to other players to do group and dungeon content.
Supporting the leveling process is consistent, I think, with Holly Longdale’s statement regarding the rationale for including paid boosts (“we’re always gonna lean into what’s going to enable people to play together who want to play, especially when Northrend is going to be going to eighty” ; ref: https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxJiHIAxBGyxfR4h9obMqn4R4mrliPGNYY)
Fears from including LFD as is:
- Significant change to the authentic timeline
The LFD conversation can tend to lose the context of timeline. People in the pro-LFD camp can tend to imply it should be included at launch (as a 3.3.5 mechanic, e.g.), while anti-LFD camp can tend to imply it should not be included at all. LFD originally released with WoW patch 3.3.0*, with Icecrown Citadel, replacing the WotLK LFG tool. A third camp, if you will, could argue it should be included along the original timeline, with ICC, either as an authenticity arugment (#nochanges) or as a compromise argument to the first two camps.
Blizzard has made the ‘Spirit of Classic’ argument (“that’s the whole point, that’s why we’re going back and doing original Classic, is to try to undo some of these things that felt like they changed the game so significantly.” - Brian; ref: https://www.youtube.com/clip/UgkxQU9gM8PBn4iU9S7h9U8kbvQWGi6Eg0nm).
However, the pro-LFD camp HAS been successful in moving the needle (“we’re closer to not-never than we ever were” -Brian; ref: https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxsuBCquvHrMdY8AOfBE_5okpkfqG95_rz)
edit: For some added context re: the ‘spirit of classic’, aka how the community felt about certain mechanics back prior to (vanilla) Classic, consider the results of this old reddit survey https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc64CYad2GpAVvH6yEl-mLd2NBlCnKeIASA8mTrRwjJQ5usDw/viewanalytics where the OVERWHELMING majority (~90%) were against flying mounts, dungeon finder, and raid finder in Classic (Vanilla Classic). Granted this was another time and a different expansion - where WotLK was not even in the conversation - but this is the sort of attitude that was prevalent in 2017.
e2: survey link not working so well. source @reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/7d1bea/the_ultimate_wow_classic_design_survey_help/
*minor detail, but unless someone can correct me, the statement that LFD was originally added in Patch 3.3.5 in the news post here appears to be inaccurate:
https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/news/23793177/return-to-the-icy-realm-of-northrend-in-world-of-warcraft-wrath-of-the-lich-king-classic%E2%84%A2
ref official patch notes 3.3.0: https://web.archive.org/web/20101107221856/http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/patch3p3.html