I’m going to say mostly the same thing I said in the comments for this WQ on Wowhead:
I generally don’t mind these puzzle WQs as they mix up the gameplay a bit, but this is without a doubt the absolute WORST version of this that Blizzard has ever done. Hell, it was apparently a fairly normal one during beta as I see some screenshots showing it as a standard puzzle WQ, but apparently someone thought it would be hilarious to crank the difficult level of this sucker through the damn roof.
Seriously guys, there’s a reason why this kind of crap shouldn’t be placed on a grid with massive overlap. I find these “untangling” puzzles to be a nice little distraction when we’re dealing with abstract shapes or triangles, but whoever thought to put all the nodes on a grid is a masochist. This is NOT fun and if the reward was 10K gold I might STILL ignore it as this takes entirely too long and way too much trial and error to actually be enjoyable.
Clearly someone at Blizzard was hoping this bumped up the time played metric. The only thing it’s doing is getting people to ignore it after finishing it once.