The idea was… ‘Fine.’
By, ‘fine,’ I mean to say the general basis of the idea, of a race that seeks to master the powers of the Void and wield it for good, to demonstrate it’s not a taboo power but rather just a power. That idea was fine.
Then Blizzard deviated hard on that idea in several ways. Namely, the race they chose for this. Until Alleria, we’d never seen ANY Thalassian elves (that weren’t raid bosses) whom wielded the Void, or even showed much interest in it. Umbric and his followers didn’t exist until their own recruitment scenario, and they didn’t exist as, “Void Elves,” until the last five minutes of it. All of this was a HUGE mistake.
If, ‘Void Elves,’ were supposed to exist, we should have seen them being seeded expansions ahead of their actual reveal. We could’ve seen Umbric and his followers as far back as Mists of Pandaria, taking an interest in the Sha, and through that, the power of the Void. We could’ve seen them in Warlords of Draenor investigating the Shadowmoon Orcs, finding flaws in their work, and also filling in gaps in their own knowledge. We should have seen them in Legion, if not in the Priest Class Hall campaign, then at LEAST as daily quest givers around the Broken Isles, dealing with void-related threats.
During all of that, we could’ve seen a story being told, seen Rommath/Lor’themar banish them from Quel’Thalas, seen them become something of a neutral group growing increasingly disenfranchised with the Horde and its leadership, increasingly wary of their powers being used by the Horde for evil. “You did well, Champion, but I’ll have that artifact back now. There are those within the Horde whom would gladly steal it from you and abuse it’s power.” Something like that at the end of a daily quest.
But, we had NONE of that. Of course, none of it would have even been necessary if Blizzard had chosen a race ALREADY knee-deep in the Void to start with. Ethereals, Krokuul, Arrakoa, etc… plenty of options for Void races. But, they went with elves, and did no seeding, world building, or foreshadowing.
In this, the idea was flawed at conception, BUT, that COULD have been resolved by properly developing the Void Elves as a race over the course of an expansion or two. Except Blizzard didn’t do that. The Void Elves only ever showed up in BFA to fight the Horde, and were left out of every Void-related storyline the expansion had. I think this shows us what the real purpose of the Void Elves were: to give Horde players a race they could feel really good about killing on the Alliance.
This is passing over other glaring issues, such as the Void being nothing more than purple flavored arcane magic for all the difference it has from what we’ve seen mages doing. Or, the fact that the Void Elf heritage armor looks like Dreadlord armor they stumbled upon in the rift and painted purple; it doesn’t look remotely elven.
I think its perfectly reasonable to like the concept Void Elves are supposed to stand for. That said, I do think people who praise them are either in general insincere, or doing themselves a disservice, because they DESERVE better from Blizzard than what we were given.
To summarize: If this is what Blizzard always intended to give us with Void Elves, then they should have just added High Elves instead.