Actually, if you look it up on Wowhead, every spec gets really consistent spells up to level 58. After that, you get two or three by level 75ish, and then nothing. Even the abilities you get then are typically passives, specifically Mastery turning on, which is a thing that should just work from level 1.
Nearly every spell is ALREADY pre-level 60. If levelling stopped there, the whole thing would already be FAR more consistent ability-wise.
It. Already. Is. Ability progression ends at 60. And have you played pre-Legion expansion content recently? Have you played Classic!? What you get now at level 10 is more than you got back then by level 40. Just selecting a spec at 10 instantly gives you more abilities that level 20’s had for most of the game.
The entire game has already been reworked to scale to any level. ilvls, mob health, mob damage, everything. Professions are modular and you can completely ignore old expansion content. They have implemented everything they need during and working up to 7.3.5 and have already ironed out all the bugs. All they have to do is flip the switch.
And all that switch has to do is remove expansions from the levelling progression. Or put them all into a single 10-level bracket. They don’t even need to touch Vanilla zones. 1-60 in Vanilla, 60-70 in any single expansion because they’re all in the same bracket, and 70-80 is current content. Or make 50-60 the expansion bracket and have Un’goro/Silithus and BRM considered the “Classic Expansion 1.0”, with current content from 60-70.
The ONLY thing that would need to change is where the talent tiers are (assuming they don’t go back to old-school trees. The devs that did the MoP revamp aren’t the current dev team, and the current team uses old-school trees all the time, such as on Artifact Weapons. Instead of every 15 levels, you get a talent every 5 or 10. Suddenly, 1-60 is pretty packed with new abilities and talents.
Most anti-squish posts boil down to backwards logic. People think “a level squish will work like X. X won’t fix levelling problems. Therefore, the level squish won’t work.” You need to approach it the other way. “Making a good levelling system for WoW looks like Y. How could a level squish help achieve Y? Yeah, that’s got a lot of promise.”
They didn’t decide on a squish, design it in the least imaginative way possible (aka, “run a divide by 2 script”) and then go “gee, I hope this solves levelling!” They were working on a DIFFERENT problem, which given recent history was pretty obviously how bad levelling was during WoD and Legion, came up with an extensive solution, and realised it would need a level squish to work. 7.3.5 was them doing all the legwork and testing the systems they’d need. Professions made non-linear by expansion. Seeing how players like being able to skip expansions by having parallel blocks. Reworking the level system of the whole game so they can change numbers at will.
This is why I’m excited for 9.0 and excited for the squish. I don’t know how good the end-game content will be, but I really think the levelling side of WoW will be vastly improved.