Its becoming increasingly clear that developing entirely new "game systems" each expansion, only to scrap them at the end, has become an enormous sink of hours and effort

I’ve been saying this for a long time. Blizzard keeps trying to reinvent the wheel and massively failing. Unless there’s some MAJOR fixes between now and release I don’t think Shadowlands is going to do very well. After getting my hands on beta and checking out all the classes & Covenants I can really only come up with two words to describe the state of Shadowlands right now on the beta.

Dumpster fire.