TLDR: People don’t trust Blizzard enough for them to pull things like this.
The thing with this, that a lot of people seem to be missing is that Blizzard has very little “Good Faith” with a huge chunk of its community. The general forums tend to sensationalize things and go a bit out of control, but this is one of the rarer cases where I think the forums actually line up with the community sentiment more often than not.
Many voices in the community feel like not only is Blizzard and the WoW team not properly listening to feedback, they’re not even addressing it. Recently they’ve been trying to rebuild trust, and most of the reactions to their efforts have been met with skepticism. And it’s earned. Especially when, right after getting praise for their reactions to feedback- they go and ignore days of it, and stealth change the pain point without addressing it.
They don’t have that type of community credit anymore. After two expansion of general intense dissatisfaction, a lot of WoW players simply don’t seem to trust them. It’s a sentiment I see on the forums, from individual friends, and even in random discords (and honestly on WoW facebook ads).
THe problem isn’t the slime cat mount, it’s that Blizzard doesn’t have enough any community trust, and have done nothing in this situation to help then gain it. In fact, this is confirming a lot of people’s fears/suspicions that they’re the exact same, haven’t learned, and are putting on a front to make us feel better and safe about spending money.
Personally? I don’t care about the Slime Cat mount I think it’s ugly and want nothing to do with it. In fact, I likely won’t play for most of season 4 if they don’t extend the leveling buff because it has nothing for me. I’m not about to raid.
I just think this, the soar nerf, and the general and sudden shift back into the old “we know best” blizzard, bodes ill for dragonflight.