My SUBJECTIVE opinion…
WoD was the casual guild killer. (In the social circles/guilds I was part of at the time.) It erased entire guilds full of casual people that worked on professions, worked on old achieves, traded stuff among their friends and did group stuff that wasn’t cutting edge content.
It pretty much drove the social glue people out of WoW. What need was there to mine/herb when there was no one to buy it? Everything was in your solo play garrison and everything your friends needed that you could have supplied was in their garrison.
My take, that decision wasn’t made to appease the “casuals”. Providing all the goodies in the garrison was done to appease the hard core raider types that hated having to deal with enchants, gems, food buffs, flasks, potions and all of the farming that went into getting those consumables.
I still remember the epic rant in Teamspeak, during MoP, from a guild member that had left our guild to go off to a cutting edge guild and was running SoO with us on an alt. We’d just downed Sha of Pride and the usual stuff was going on. People were swapping enchants, gems, and a couple had popped back to reforge. Then someone asked for a food buff. Instantly we had four or five noodle carts up and people were laughing at how many there were. His rant started with “What in the @#$@# is the matter with you people, everyone of you is gemmed, enchanted and has maxed professions, but you aren’t raiders… all anyone in our raid guild complains about is having to do all the extra crap required before they can set foot in the raid and you people are giving away gems, enchants, and consumables for free…”
Doing the extra stuff was a natural for people that were into that kind of thing to begin with. Besides we had people that knew they weren’t going to have the reflexes or reaction times to be the best at mechanics, but they could be the best at everything else the game/world provided. To quote one of our officers, “just because we are casual doesn’t mean you get to be bad”.
Edit: spelling