Beyond the hacked together story, double down of borrowed power and technical issues, the expansion launched in an extremely player-unfriendly state:
- no mounting in the Maw
- conduit energy
- torghast farming was both difficult and boring
- only real way to earn anima was WQ grinding
- extremely long travel time between zones
- time-locking of content was probably the worst the game had ever seen
- launched in a close-to-unfinished state with some bugs not fixed until future patches
By the time they started repairing the damage in 9.1, a lot of people had simply had enough. And it didn’t help that each patch fixed some things but brought in new problems. Korthia was terrible and had zero replayability. Sepulcher of the First ones was easily the most overtuned raid they ever released. Just a lot of questionable decisions over the course of the entire expansion.