The general opinion of Blizzard is that they are money hungry, with Activisions fingers in the cookie jar. We cannot make the claim on these forums that Blizzard is driven by profits, but then claim they are intentionally harming their own profits.
You have to ask yourself what is more likely:
Not as many people leave because of Pathfinder as I think.
Blizzard, a publicly traded company, intentionally makes bad financial decisions by ignoring all the data they collect. They do this specifically to protect the ego of Chilton. the guy who originally removed flight, who is no longer even on World of Warcraft.