And in this post I categorically explains why asking for player housing in WoW specifically is fundamentally different. You gave this as your TL;DR and there’s several glaring issues with it:
Your first point isn’t even a point. None of that matters, what people want is to play the game. WoW specifically. For the average players the Garrison was a fun list of activities to complete and once done with them one moved onto other thing; transmog, roleplay, pet battles, and much else. Add to that the importance that PvE has to WoW and you got raid and M+ at this point. Not to mention PvP even if that’s one of WoW’s smaller endgame pillars.
Anyone who says “Research X” as an argument fails to understand this: Blizzard has done that already. Many times over most likely. Big companies don’t do things just on a whim but make decisions based on what their customers want and trying to predict the changing market. WoW is still king and numerically every estimate still places it in leagues ahead of every other MMO (except for games like Genshin Impact).
And this is yet another talking point; “rebuild professions to work with housing decorations”. How? The only way to realistically do it is add a profession that doesn’t matter to a majority of players or to rip up and destroy what they added in Dragonflight. If you want proof of the unpopular nature of this, look at craftable Dragonriding cosmetics. Do people make them? Of course, but not regularly enough where they matter as a demographic. Folks request them to fill out lists and achievements, not because they actually want them. Which again has to do with the particular type of playerbase WoW has.
I will be honest, I have no idea what STO did and I’m going to give you a clue as to why: it is a Star Wars game on Steam, so we have accurate numbers of its average player count on Steam, namely roughly 6000 active players in the past 24 hours.
Guild halls is basically the only thing that realistically could work. But it is basically impossible to think of how it would work except as an expansion specific feature. Which in turn may stick around or may be left behind, again see Class Order Halls and Covenants, and me pointing out that’s not the last we’ll see of them. But that’s about it.
What you are saying here is “Give us the Garrison with a Mission Table *again”. That’s the problem - no one wants that.
The day that WoW introduces timers that can be skipped with money is the day that WoW has died. See the entirety of “Worst MMO Ever”-series of examples as to why: when MMOs die, systems are implemented to squeeze out more money from the remaining players. If WoW adds timers and a way to skip out on those timers for money, then WoW has officially died.
Sorry but none of your wishes changes anything: WoW is none of the games you listed for a very specific reason. We don’t have homes in WoW. Never have, never will. Because we aren’t settlers, we aren’t playing a single player game (even folks playing solo ain’t). Folks are playing a game built around the idea of being social and that doesn’t mean that one has to interact with other players. What it means is that you are part of a living breathing world and that’s it. Blizzard has gotten way, way better at making the world feel more and more alive even when there’s very few players online. Is this an exact definition? No of course not, nothing can have an exact definition as to what makes WoW what it is, which is why the only thing one can point towards that makes it WoW and has kept players for 18 years is to point with one’s entire hand towards the game and say “Because it is WoW”.
If folks actually cared about these things to the degree that you imply they do … then they would be playing other games. WoW is what it is today because it is what it was 18 years ago, just more polished. That’s what makes WoW unique and is a unique strength and weakness.