I’m kinda in the same boat as you. Won’t go heavily into the gameplay side of things much, but I had one guild collapse on me already this expansion. If that happens again, I’m done.
Regarding the lore, the Horde’s pretty much over for me. They gutted and removed everything that made it appealing, and seem intent on making it Diet Alliance.
-Thrall’s gone from being the visionary young shaman who saw a bright future for the orcs living largely on their own, away from the humans (not necessarily hostile to humans, but certainly not a part of their society). He’s now going through a mid-life crisis, no longer wants to lead the Horde (walked away from it twice now), and isn’t even a shaman. What’s left of him at this point?
-Vol’Jin’s gone and seemingly replaced by a combination of Rokhan and Zappyboi. Rokhan himself isn’t all bad, but he has nowhere near the development that Vol’Jin did. Zappyboi’s just a joke character.
-Cairne is gone and replace by Baine. Baine just flat out sucks as a character. He’s never done anything of significance in the actual WoW game, and his entire story in the books and other media is basically him being incompetent and needing others to bail him out. Oh, and being Anduin’s friend. In BfA, we see this continue, along with everyone declaring how awesome Baine is and how he’s the supposed best the Horde can offer. Baine, in turn, heroically stays in Thunder Bluff while the rest of the Horde confronts Sylvanas. His one redeeming grace is abolishing the title of Warchief so that we never have to suffer from Warchief Baine.
-Sylvanas is replaced by Calia. A book-only character that you can only interact with on Alliance toons or priests. She’s basically as far removed from the Forsaken as possible, and is there mostly to “correct” the faction from its erroneous ways (In Bliz’s and the Alliance’s eyes).
-Gazlowe is replacing Gallywix. Nothing wrong with Gazlowe, but it’s yet more of the general re-branding of the Horde. It’s a shame, because Gallywix was one of the few characters who was enjoyably awful - awful just because he’s awful rather than due to an old god / demon / some other higher entity nonsense.
So, here we are with most of the leadership torn down and filled in with very bland replacements and at least two heavily Alliance leading members.
I legitimately don’t see who the faction is really aimed at or supposed to appeal to anymore. Why even bother with two factions if one’s just going to be willingly subservient to the other?
More fundamentally, we’re 15 years in and nearing the end of the 8th expansion, yet it feels like the Horde never really took off as its own faction. Nearly all of the major events or problems wind up getting solved by the Alliance or Alliance leaning groups. So, now, here we are yet again restructuring the Horde except now with even weaker characters at the helm. It’s just impossible to envision the Horde going on to accomplish anything meaningful from this point on.
…
Faction nonsense aside, I absolutely hate how the story played out this expansion. Never before have they made me feel that my character is as irrelevant as it was in this expansion. Nearly every quest, dungeon and raid boss, and major event had a bunch of NPC’s talking (sometimes present; sometimes offscreen) and generally taking credit for the work my character did. At no point was my character ever really the pivotal force making or breaking anything - it always was the NPC’s being the ones to ultimately finish everything. The war campaign had a “choice” system that wound up being of no consequence - you wind up exactly the same regardless of who you help or betray. Finally, the main storyline of the expansion - Sadfang’s Journey - wasn’t something you could even take part of. It was all him off on his own. You, in the meantime, have to do a bunch of nonsense stuff for some turtles in Nazjatar.
My PC is the champion of Azeroth - the one person with the means of saving the planet. How that is pushed aside completely just for a sad orc. is completely beyond me.
I’m just legitimately baffled at how deliberately they could write the PC out of the story and consider it a success. It honestly felt much more like a badly written stage-play than a war. Yeah, there’s a terrible war going on in the background; naturally, we need to keep coming up with reasons for all the generals and leaders to keep meeting up and complaining about how awful one leader is or whatever the current issue of the day is. Oh, and the final resolution for it is just this leader killing an orc and then leaving without any further action, so everyone can get back to standing around and talking again.
…
So, actually answering the OP’s question, I don’t see them fixing things going forward. My best hope would be a split timeline from Classic, but that’s not going to happen. And, honestly, a lot of current WoW’s stuff diminishes my enjoyment of Classic too. It’s very hard to engage oneself in the story and environment when you already know what does - and doesn’t - happen in the future. It’s hard to enjoy the Forsaken, for example, when you know that Sylvanas won’t actually confront Arthas in a meaningful way.
Another factor at play is just general fatigue and boredom with the constant “big bad” as a villain. Arthas and the TBC Legion were fine. The stuff with the Void, the Light, and now some spoopy death entity though, is a bit grating. It’s annoying that every Big Bad is now acting to try and stave off an even Bigger Bad down the line. I don’t know how we reached a point where Azshara is a mid-expansion raid boss serving an Old God who’s release serves some death god’s interest, but we did and it feels pretty dumb.