You talk as if artistic quality was entirely subjective, but it’s simply not. Taste is subjective. You can like a poor story, but it’s still a poor story. There’s reason why even the worst movies and songs have fans.
Narrative structure is very important for the quality of a story. The structure itself can vary, but you can see the difference when you read a poor story and a rich one.
There’s a lot of small rules of how to create an engaging narrative, and void elf introduction just lacks so many of them that I could make a huge essay in this.
For instance, consider this: void elves didn’t merit even their own reputation faction you could quest with and earn the trust as their prerequisites. The reputation used had nothing to do with them, and that alone proves how there was no setup. The requisite is there for purely mechanical purposes, a to-do list that has nothing to do with the narrative.
Second, the story that is used as a prerequisite, Alleria’s story, fails to seed or foreshadow the void elves in any way. That alone is not a sin, but since the race didn’t exist back then, and no narrative tropes were used to build up towards their birth, it means their introduction would require a lot more care in order to have a good structure.
Third, that care never came. Their story is hushed and depthless. You are told the basic things: there’s this elf called Umbric that studies the void, go find him and his followers. But you never delve into them. You never see their story beyond this basic premise, you don’t meet them, don’t talk to them, don’t get to know their outlook on things. Once you find Umbric, he’s put out of comission by the ethereals.
Who are these ethereals? Where they came from? What were they doing there? No Clues, no answer. They were just there.
Then you save the elves, and, yay, they are transformed. Let’s explore what that transformation means? How they cope with it? What advantages and drawbacks it has? No. The void elves pledge themselves to the Alliance without even requiring a moment to think, and you are sent back to Stormwind to report your success. The end.
It’s a by-the-numbers effort that just runs over the bare minimum narrative elements of a introductory story. It never delves in the details, it never stops to tell the tales of these elves, it never tries to make you care about them, sympathize with them.
Like their unlocking requisites, the story presented is just a mechanic, a to-do list with the objective of enabling another race in your character creation menu, instead of fleshing out its lore .
If you wrote a story like that in a contest, you’d have no chance of winning. And that’s objectively bad.
I’ll compare it to that challenge of speed drawing. The more effort and the more technique put into a story, the better it is. Same as drawing:
https://themindcircle.com/speed-drawing-challenge/
Void elf story was like a 10-sec drawing.
