From the blizzard side, its a bunch of grinds all supporting each other to keep players engaged in the game. From players side, it should give them far more choice on what they desire to achieve each day.
What part of the game to engage with, and a chance for guilds to support each other without ruining the play of players who prefer a close to full solo experience.
TBH, even as someone who primarily plays solo content, I think the cap on solo gear acquisition should be pretty low - outside of PvP. You should be able to buy/craft your way into heroic dungeon ilevels, but everything after that should take some organized effort.
If you want to slowly increase your power to high levels by playing alone, there's a whole genre called "RPG" designed around that concept. WoW can't provide equivalent rewards for solo players without making group content irrelevant. There's no sense of accomplishment or motivation to get people together and work on an encounter if you could just go gather 100 bear butts in the same time and get a guaranteed reward of the same value.
That is the intent, you go out do your thing. The idea is there is options :) Professions are mostly solo content, but the selling and trade is not.
The idea should be that all content feeds into other content, and that without a high bloat of gear. The gear stays a bit lower longer, It also means if players are having a bit of bad luck. The community itself should support that, and they have options as well to circumvent the bad luck up to a high point relative.
Players should be able to get quite far with time, only few special things should be extremely locked. And not even close to how it is now.
Casual players need something to work towards, But blizzard just goes with hand outs to catch them up.
You can say, this thing is raids only since its harder, But a MMO should be Time+effort+Difficulty with a variance.
Everything working together, People put a lot of effort into Professions. and there rewards are, wouldn't it be nice if anyone wanted anything i could make, let alone selling it for what its worth.
you would find players need less handouts, if the systems for them where in a healthy state.
Things like titanforgeing would be largely unneeded, and players could be doing content for things that can still hold value.
Good luck is still just awesome, Effort has rewards, and time has rewards all together. Finding that balance would all take time, but they should have more time.
Players can get on a do what they find enjoyable, even if the game still has that grind.
Also time gate things to the players effort and time, If players are working together at something it would be extremely helpful for a general community health. Info in game for this is needed.
Provide ways for every type of player to play there part, dungeons all providing something. profession hand ins, and drops from the world all providing some form of progression and part of the reward.
Something every person can get and find useful in some way.
One of the big issues is that the devs and blizzard are burning bridges, Something like pathfinder could have gone down well if they had just come out and said. We are trying something new with flying, we will talk about it in a few months.
Scaling did not fix any of the real issues with leveling, but i bet that take a lot of work and time.
Professions in legion had a lot of extra work, but to say it was good. The outcome was a slightly less bad version than we have now.
And now we have Azarite, i do not think i have ever seen a MMO get something so wrong. Its the least engaging i have ever found gearing ever, in any MMO i have play.