The game become stale because professions don’t make gold later in game. its cheaper to buy in auction then level up a profession other than the few expensive crafts, you cant make gold at all unless you have loads of gold from farming gold because the auction house prices. cooking is a great example, you can buy food for 14 gold instead of farming for an hour or 30 minutes. Only way to fix this issue would be to put out your mini new area’s with new crafting and farming. This results into only farming for gold instead of farming a node. Its easier to farm gold later in game than make gold from professions.
I thought WoW became stale because people min/max the fun out of it from day one then complain after 2 weeks that they’ve got nothing left to do and have no idea what’s going on in the story because they skip all cutscenes and quest text.
People always need stuff. Some people are always going to want to get an item instantly rather than having to craft it. So there’s always gold. Sure, it’s not as “omg gold is falling from the sky every time I sneeze” like it is at the beginning, but there’s still lots of gold to be made from professions.