I wouldn’t say you were wrong or stand corrected. Blizzard did, in fact, touch on wanting to keep this mount more exclusive and not as common down the road when they compared it to the mammoth.
Rankin is wrong again, as you can see from the blue post. There was talk about luxury mounts, the AH mount is in the same boat since they, plain as day, compared the two.
We’ve seen how luxury mounts like the Traveler’s Tundra Mammoth started out as something special and rare: a repair vendor wherever you are! They were originally ultra-exclusive and mostly purchased by guild banks for convenient raid use, but then became increasingly commonplace due to gold inflation over time.