I think you both are making good and fair points but I want to comment on this…
I don’t believe this justifies JAB’s remark. You’re absolutely right, the demand for significant and game altering QoL changes came very soon on the heels of Classic’s launch. I also remember the RDF debacle, it’s actually something that still disapointments me. I thought Phase 1 WotLK without it was so good, and even though Blizzard’s reimplementation of the group finder tool was sub-par compared to retail’s, I thought it was a step in the right direction for keeping people interacting with each other for group formation and experiencing the world (per their dang design pillars at the time) but also providing a more practical and modern way of finding groups. The Classic feel felt intact but it was easier to use. But the masses revolted and whined and Blizzard caved.
Still, that’s the key word in all of this… the masses.
It’s important to remember who Vanilla was for and who was asking for it. It’s not those masses, it’s the people who remember what Vanilla was like and wanted to keep playing that. It’s the people who were already doing so on private servers and wanted an official/legitimate server to play on. They (mostly) got what they wanted and a lot of them continue to play to this day. They thought they did, and they did. It was all the people who got caught up in the hype surrounding it, who came to play expecting retail wow in a new setting but got something completely different. JAB’s statement wasn’t true for that group… Classic WoW just wasn’t for them.
So I don’t think there’s any retroactive justification at play here. For the people asking for Classic WoW in the first place, they got what they wanted. There’s also a group of people who weren’t asking for it but had forgotten how great that version was and rediscovered it. For everybody else… well, I don’t walk into the sushi restaurant across the street from me and demand fried chicken. No, I just go to the fried chicken restaurant right next door for that.
Last thing… I’m genuinely curious how the Classic Era numbers today compare to private server numbers pre-2019 when people were asking for official servers. There’s 17k (ish) people actively raiding in Era right now, which means that there’s definitely more than that when you include the non-raiders. I was never active on private servers but I seem to recall hearing that there was maybe a couple thousand, at best? I googled and it looks like Nostalrius had maybe 8000 at its low end, which should be reasonably comparable to now.
It’s tough to be certain but I do feel reasonably confident in saying that Vanilla WoW is more popular than it’s been since, well, Vanilla. There’s something to be said about that.