The problem is they do listen to players, but not the players that want vanilla to be reminiscent of old school MMORPGs. Most WoW players do not care about the open world and contested mobs and materials, they want layers so they can’t be bothered.
As hard as I am on devs, I also don’t think this is a developer problem. Layers and one megaserver saves the single dollar company on server costs, and it’s not a big enough deal breaker to impact player numbers. We’ve done this to ourselves.