- your friends are clearly enjoying shadowlands. That should be enough evidence you need to get shadowlands.
- the randoms on the forums are chiefly the vocal minority, all you need to do is remember back to the forums during past expansions, even during good expansions (i.e. legion) and the non-stop complaining and claims about how wow is dying, etc during those good expansions too.
Simply put, people will always focus on any smalll negative aspect of anything and exaggerate and blow it to to outrageous proportions, Another thing to notice too is often these people who complain are often people who don’t do any content (check out their armories) or they are people who are complaining for the sake of complaining, claiming they are unsubbing, but you check their armories or posts, and they still have activity days, weeks, months later, etc.
Lastly, you need to keep in mind that it’s barely the 9.0 patch, still got at least 2 more patches to go, even great expansions such as Legion, the legion 7.0 patch was plagued with infuriating content, rng, and timegating (i.e. rng legendaries and artifact weapon questline timegating, and forced rep grinds) while the later patches remedied and turned legion into one of the greatest expansions ever. Also another thing you can be certain of, Shadowlands sure isn’t another BFA, 9.0 SL is better than 8.0-8.3 BFA combined so far.