Yeah that probably would have affected it. Basically one of the biggest issues with multispeccing in Legion (apart from the fact you just couldn’t get multiple legendaries due to the hidden cap), was that the classes were pruned around the artifact weapon and legendaries.
Since AP was a limited resource you couldn’t spend it on another spec without sacrificing that progress on your main spec. It already took months with the base AP gains to get access to your golden dragons on your main spec, nevermind also trying to get them on your alt specs.