In my opinion, Shadowlands lacks ambition. I somewhat predicted this happening when you look at the announcement trailer they gave us at Blizzcon. One thing you notice as you pay attention to the trailer is that it is artificially inflated by stretching selling points.
One example of this is that in almost all previous trailers, they never bothered to list all zones as a separate feature. The MoP trailer shows “New Continent: Pandaria”, whereas the Shadowlands trailer actually shows “Explore the Shadowlands!” and then goes to “New Zone: X” for all four of the available zones. This is a stark contrast to previous trailers and indicates to me that Blizzard was quite aware that, had they chosen to go the old route up until Legion, the trailer would be only 2/3 as long as previous expansions and show a lack of “smaller” features.
Secondly, one of the two big new features isn’t ambitious or creative. Essentially, it’s an order hall with a different re-skin. The entire thing rests on grinding WQ to purchase upgrades, which honestly makes them the most barebone “carrot on a stick” in ages. Almost any MMORPG has carrots on a stick. If you think about it, the stronghold feature in SWTOR (housing) is a “carrot on a stick” too. You farm decorations that drop from different activities and put them into your stronghold.
The major difference is that there are so many different ways to get these decorations that it doesn’t feel barebones. 90% of all anima is coming from WQ and 95% of all grateful offerings (for cosmetic items) come from the same two sources - open the special chest once a day and doing two out of six daily quests. There is a variance of about 15-20 WQ and daily quests/objectives in the anima conductor/the general zone which make up for 95%+ of all the currency you need to unlock the Covenant Halls and consumables.
There is a point to be made that WoD had too much focus on Garrison content, despite me actually quite enjoying the expansion for class design and due to the zones being great, but even the Garrison was more complex during it’s inception than Covenant Halls. You had utility buildings, different large buildings for rewards, profession specific buildings and so on. I could have a PvP char with the PvP Sanctum, a mount farming character with the Stables and so on. It wasn’t much, but it was still a bit better than the “one size fits all” upgrades that are Covenant Sanctums.
Torghast is a separate issue where I think Blizzard majorly dropped the ball. It’s a weekly chore for Soul Ash that, outside of Twisted Corridor, gives you literally no incentive to run continuously except Soul Ash. There’s no cosmetics, no pets, no titles and no other rewards besides currency. Once you go through TC once, you have all the cosmetics you can get from it and you can basically stop ever interacting with it. It’s a currency machine without replayability.
TL;DR of this rant is that SL feels lacking to me because there is no ambition in it’s design. Torghast is a currency printer. The Covenant Sanctum is a WQ grind - get anima from WQ, turn it in, buy reward. Rince and repeat ad infinitum. There is no new class or profession to sink your teeth into. There is no depth to the two new systems. Heck, they even got rid of archaeology, so we lost profession content. Nothing in it is bad, but it’s the most obvious carrot on a stick design I’ve seen to date.