Obviously there are going to be progression systems. They point was that they were previously endless.
I think they are still convinced players will “adapt” and get over it.
So what was the motive behind having legendaries like Taragosa’s Rest and the Daggers of the Black Prince behind gold walls? Although relatively cheap now they weren’t back in Cata. Tokens didn’t exist back then.
Except it was totally done wrong.
I leveled up Bracers at the start of SL, which turned out to be a losing slot. Even for CN/ 9.1.
Now we get into current game, and it’s even worse because Bracers are a Domination Gem slot, so NO ONE is going to put their legendary there.
So I’m having to start all over a max a new slot.
THIS IS UTTERLY STUPID.
For the insane amount of mats and gold required (EASILY was 1M gold to max the first round), we should have instead make a basic, foundation item that could then be used in ANY slot. Forcing the player to try and figure out which slot would be “the most functional” ended up taking any enjoyment I have had out of BS for this SL.
So no, Professions were not done well. It’s a half-baked idea with a zero-baked delivery. WHY ARE PROFESSIONS SO HARD FOR THIS TEAM???
We have 16 slots for gear. Every profession should provide some sort of boost for 2-3 slots. That’s all you have to do to make EVERY profession viable. Instead of having Alchemy rule the world, Enchanting being important, and everything else being pretty much worthless.
Tbh I think this legendary system is terrible if you have to fill different leggos for different roles or swap specs at all. Especially if you play varied content. They went a full 180 on the other side of Legion. Too many things you freely had access to within limits of farm. Conduits, soulbinds, and the covenant abilites just layered on layers and layers of crap to give them more to balance. “Balance” 
plus the dom shard system and the extra chisel is just too much garbage sitting around.
Having leggos scale levels and re-grinding torghast is godawful. I’d take visions for another year instead of this. They could’ve just done professions with scaled BoEs or BoPs like some of the old items instead earlier on. Tie items to certain content and not have them work anywhere else, like pvp ilvl.
By this logic, Blizzard shouldn’t listen to player suggestions, because everything I listed was suggested by players.
Technically, talents—although those really haven’t “progressed” since what, Legion? WoD?
But actually, my point is really that all power that isn’t part of your character while they are naked is temporary, and often even those get changed around between expansions.
Cosmetics, however, are forever—which is why I will always feel better about spending stupid amounts of gold on mounts and transmog than things like legendaries that have a shelf life of maybe 9-12 months at best.
I liked that the story while leveling was linear. While I did like Legion later on I didn’t like how the leveling zones were able to do done in any order. It made the leveling story feel like 5 different stories with nothing connecting them.
It literally comes down to “if you have the gold to level the legendary patterns you can make more gold, otherwise you’re out of luck and will never touch your profession ever”.
Being able to craft them was better than RNG, but they still got everything else wrong. Some are just so much more powerful than others that they’ve literally never been used in any content, while others are such a clear choice that you’d only take that. Then you have issues where some specs/classes need a separate legendary for each fight (AoE, ST, Cleave, M+, PvP) meaning that spec has to craft 2-5 legendaries and keep on top of it, while other classes only need 1 for every bit of content.
They got rid of a lot of the endless grind, but there was still far too much grind. Specifically the rep/currency in the maw for sockets, and the korthia rep for whatever that gives. Rep locks are never fun when tied to player power and exist purely to extend our subs.
Or they could have just listened to the players in the alpha/beta testing phase and not tied any player power to covenants. That would have solved all the problems that covenants had. Design the specs to work at a baseline level like they have in the past (MoP and WoD for example had amazing class design) and make small adjustments as needed for balance isntead of tying uninteresting power to reps, grinding, RNG and a locked-in ‘choice’.
Could try the shadowlands wormhole, bolts, or gears and see if they sell quick enough to be worth profiting.
Well said.