or its like the same as giving us a new talent row wow crazy hah dudes.
Except it can’t be a meaningful choice and here is why.
Everyone is different. What has meaning, or is meaningful to you, is not necessarily meaningful to someone else.
You can’t design a choice in a game, and declare that to be the singular “meaningful” choice in the game. It wasn’t a choice at all for me. I was going to be night fae regardless out of principle.
For many hunters there was no choice because outside of top tier pvp, Wild Spirits is best in literally every scenario. It’s best at AoE, it’s best at burst, it’s best at ST, it’s best against bosses (for hunters obviously). Outside of 1 small niche, it’s the best option.
But again, meaningful to you is not necessarily meaningful to someone else, so labeling something as the “meaningful choice” is pointless.
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Oh I know, but if people are complaining about having to have the correct covenant or being benched, then why not address the whole issue of it and remove the possibility of people being benched for not being the suitable class.
Seems weird that people would say “this form of exclusion is unacceptable, but this form of exclusion is fine”.
It’s pretty hypocritical to say "I’m ok with benching this person because he plays a Rogue, but I’m not ok with having to benching this Hunter because he didn’t choose Wild Spirits.
I mean, that is a choice. You have a reason that you picked Night Fae for which I take from context wasn’t purely performance based.
That is the entire premise behind choice. You decided something was important to you, and you let that drive your decision instead of other factors.
I mean, thank you for ignoring the rest of my post and focusing on the 1 thing you thought proved your point.
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LOL. Common strategy really.
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Simply put? Two reasons:
(1) Double or even triple standards are a known and accepted part of customization in WoW, although decreasingly as you approach the highest levels of content (and only because they become, well, more exclusive, removing those previous leniencies, usually but not always — as more often in M+ — because they need to be).
People can accept that you really only want to play Arcane on your Mage, even if its maximal performance falls some 8% short of Fire in the pulls available to your party in the present key. But running the wrong Covenant or Legendary for that spec, even for a mere 2% loss? Well, then we need to have some words, Mage.
Is it odd? Yes, but it’s also been notable since Legion. Player choice is only accepted by the community in certain degrees, especially since it’s known that skilled players may be more skilled at certain specs than others, yet assumed that one build of said spec plays near enough the same as others that anyone can swap about in said spec as optimization demands.
(2) It’s not just a matter of maximal throughput over time, but WHEN that throughput occurs. Timing and profile are increasingly important as difficulty increases. Many Covenant skills have a disproportionate effect upon profile and capacity.
Have you seen this cord that we be ripping?
The meaning is that the choice has a cost to it, if you choose one you can’t easily choose another.
It’s not ah oooh feely meaning.
It’s got nothing to do with what I find meaningful or you find meaningful, it’s got everything to do with what the developers chose to be meaningful.
And that is exactly as I pointed out, a choice that has a cost behind it.
It’s not, class and race are also both meaningful choices. Previously spec was, as was talents, as was artifact choice in Legion. Wolvar or Oracles in WotLK, Aldor or Scryer in TBC.
We also used to have it in roles and gear acquisition.
You are assuming that a choice can only be made based on performance power, which is unfortunately naive.
There are many different metrics that people can derive choice from.
Why do you think there are players who are Vulpera which is objectively the worst performing race in the game?
Again it is defined by Blizzard and by the game design principles.
Happier now?
Except the developers have no more control over what someone finds meaningful than anyone else. Everyone is different and finds meaning in different things.
I don’t find meaning in the covenant choice because it wasn’t a choice for me. It was “This is the nature covenant that night elves would be most likely to identify with so, that’s what I stuck with.”
A lot of more performance oriented people are stuck in covenants they have no interest in because that’s what has been determined to be the best for their class/spec.
Not for everyone.
For some people race matters a lot. For others race means nothing.
For some class is a very important thing, for others they play what they find fun at the time and class has very little impact.
No, I was giving two examples of going about this “meaningful choice”.
Blizzard can’t determine what meaningful is for everyone. It’s an impossibility.
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I’m at the point where I don’t care personally.
Clearly you never read anything. Blizzard designs the game, their rules their way.
Blizzard deem a meaningful choice to be “a choice that has a cost to it. One that cannot simply be changed at will”
It doesn’t matter if you deem meaning from lore, or aesthetics, or power.
That is not what Blizzard’s meaningful choice is. Blizzard’s view of a meaningful choice is one you can’t easily undo.
All you have said is “power isn’t meaningful to some people” “aesthetics isn’t meaningful to some people” etc. But at the end of the day it doesn’t matter, what people find meaningful doesn’t matter.
The only thing that matters is Blizzard’s interpretation of what they deem a meaningful choice is. Alliance or Horde, Mage or Priest, Dwarf or Draenei, Wolvar or Oracle, Blood Sail Buccaneers or Steamweedle Cartel, Kyrian or Necrolord etc.
These are choices that Blizzard deems meaningful. Ones you can’t easily back out of.
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Blizzard could design the universe and it still wouldn’t make them capable to determining what is meaningful to people.
“We are Blizzard, and this is your meaningful choice” doesn’t automatically make it meaningful to anyone. It’s the individual who decides what has meaning and for a lot of people the covenant choice had no meaning. Sorry, but them’s the facts.
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The only thing they find meaningful is keeping us on the loot treadmill so they can keep their numbers up for the investors. They really don’t give a rotund rodents rectum if we are enjoying ourselves.
Players: We hate the Maw and Torghast
Blizz: Since you all hate the Maw and Torghast , you will be questing in the Maw and Raiding in Torghast.
Players: We hat waiting until the x.2 patch for flying
Blizz : no problem this expansion we will put it in during the x.1 patch
Players : Where is the x.1 patch and flying
Blizz: We decided to put the x.1 patch out around the time we would normally do a x.2 patch that way we could still make you all wait almost a year for flying.
Players: 
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Your bias is galling.
Take off those blinkers, you are not a horse.
If I offer you a choice between two fruits and apple and an orange. You can have one, and the other one is disposed of.
We have a meaningful choice.
If you choose the apple you can no longer have the orange. That is the meaning. It doesn’t matter why you chose it over the other, simply that you were made to.
No fluffy nonsense about preferences or whatever you construe as meaningful.
The meaning is if you pick one, you cannot have the other. Just like in all of the pokemon games, you make a meaningful choice of which starter you take and that’s it. You don’t just get the other starters anyway, you can’t freely swap between them.
That is how game designers make meaningful choices. You can develop your own meaning if you want whether that is power or aesthetics or theme.
Their only job is to give you that ultimatum, force you into a decision where your choice has a cost, and that cost is either the inability to get the other starters, or that it take a lot of effort to swap covenant, or you need to pay a real money transaction to swap faction or race.
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Clever.
Except I have said previously of ways that they system could have been changed. Like having abilities tied to soulbinds and having a single base soulbind the one we interact with through the campaign as a generic one everyone gets with the other soulbinds as bonuses for the covenant you picked.
/gasp
It isn’t bias to say “you clearly don’t understand what Blizzard perceives and implements as a meaningful choice” and try and educate them.
But perhaps your bias also blinds you 
I’m going to jump in and just throw my support behind what Dawnspirit has said. Regardless of what Blizzard thinks is a meaningful choice for me the only meaningful choice I’ve made in this entire game is what main I am playing.
How is covenants meaningful if I can swap every other week between them?
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Except in this case, Blizzard and you tried to decide what is meaningful for other people. Not everyone is the same. What you find meaningful other people look at and go “this is dumb and pointless.”
A singular person or entity can’t decide what is meaningful for everyone. So making a singular “meaningful” choice is doomed to failure.
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The meaning is you can have one or the other. It’s not difficult to understand.
"A meaningful choice in a role-playing game is a choice made by a player of the game that has the following characteristics:
- The player knows they are making a choice
- The choice has consequences
- The player has information to inform their choice"
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