I liked Shadowlands a lot too, but the expansion is very much a “you had to be there” scenario, because the Shadowlands you’re able to play now is a post-9.1.5 Shadowlands. Yeah, the story is lackluster (even by WoW standards) but the things people hated the most about Shadowlands were gameplay-related.
Shadowlands prior to Patch 9.1.5 is defined by how many arbitrary restrictions Blizzard could slap onto any given expansion feature. Covenants as you experience them now are just four different stories you can freely swap between and a ton of cosmetics tied to each, but Covenants as they existed for much of Shadowlands were a player power choice first and a cosmetic choice second. Blizzard wanted it to be a “meaningful choice,” but players rightfully called this out as a failure as early as the Alpha and it failed unlike anything the world had ever seen.
You could want to be a Necrolord Boomkin, but being a Necrolord Boomkin made you useless while being a Night Fae (and later Venthyr) Boomkin made you an incredibly powerful spec. But Venthyr sucked for Feral and Resto. You had to basically kill off multiple of your specs to play the one you really wanted to play.
And back then, you needed to wait TWO WEEKS to swap your Covenant. Now you can do it instantly.
This was amplified further by Soulbinds and Conduits. Now Soulbinds are just some neat little thing you don’t really engage with, but in current-content SL they were a massive source of player power and much of that power came from spec-specific Conduits. But if you wanted to swap out, say, your Fire Conduits for your Frost Conduits for one of your Soulbinds you had to use up some Conduit Energy (which no longer exists) to add new Conduits to that Soulbind tree, and you only got Conduit Energy slowly over the course of multiple days. So the game punished you not only for wanting to play multiple specs that used different Covenants but also for wanting to play multiple specs that used the same Covenant and Soulbind.
And then Torghast, the now cosmetic-only Roguelike mode that seemed very promising during Alpha, was another massive problem. Torghast would’ve been cool as a cosmetic-only thing, but Blizzard decided to lock Soul Ash and Soul Cinders (currencies that you needed to craft your very strong, but very expensive, Legendaries) behind completing high Torghast layers. And you could only farm a finite amount of Soul Ash/Cinders per week. And if you didn’t get your currency for the week, there was no catchup. And many of the legendary powers were locked behind specific Torghast wings. And back then, only two Torghast wings, at random, would be available to run per week. And there was a time where Torghast was much, much harder which frustrated tons of players.
And then there was the original Maw, where you couldn’t use most ground mounts so you were basically playing through a level 1-39 Classic zone in a 2020 version of WoW. And where the rep you spent forever grinding for had a lot of player power locked behind it. And where as you completed objectives you’d fill up a meter that would throw nuisances at you as you filled it and, once filled, it effectively locked you out of the zone for the day.
And then there was the incredibly disliked Patch 9.1, which introduced a horrible new zone in Korthia with a 30+ day rep grind that locked a ton of player power behind it, introduced a disliked raid, and introduced a system tied heavily to that disliked raid that felt like a spiteful version of tier sets. That system, Shards of Domination, involved killing raid bosses, praying you got specific shards (there were three groups of three: the Blood, the Frost, and the Unholy shards), upgrading them with a weekly-limited currency called Stygian Embers, and in you equipped all three Shards of a type and had a specific armor slot from the raid (Helm for Unholy, Shoulders for Frost, and Chest for Blood) you could activate very powerful set bonuses. The upgrade system for these set bonuses was added the week before the raid released so it went untested. At the time 9.1 launched the Unholy set bonus was exclusively the best option, by a large margin, and when fully upgraded your Unholy set bonus was worth a whopping 15% of your damage in the raid. The Blood and Frost sets were comparatively incredibly weak. So Blizzard announced they’d nerf all three sets three weeks after World First ended, effectively buffing the entire raid by like 7.5%. Players absolutely freaked out over this, so Blizzard walked it back and instead buffed the Blood/Frost sets to be as good as (or often better than) the Unholy set. But by that point, most players had upgraded their Unholy set with their, again, very limited Stygian Embers that you could farm only a finite amount of per week and that had no catchup mechanisms in place for and as such retroactively had their upgrades invalidated anyway.
Eventually, Patch 9.1.5 rolled around and fixed almost all of these gameplay issues. Covenants were freely swappable, Conduit Energy was removed, Soul Ash/Cinders were farmable, all the Torghast wings would eventually be open simultaneously, the Archivist’s Codex rep became something that took you 2 hours to max out instead of 30+ days, etc.
And it’s important to note that this was at the height of COVID and that Blizzard really didn’t have the infrastructure needed to support developing the game remotely. So Shadowlands had an abysmal patch cadence. Patch 9.0 lasted eight months when it should’ve ended in about six, and 9.1 lasted quite long as well. This expansion was doomed to ship the way it did and there was almost no way Blizzard was ever going to be able to correct course even if they weren’t stubborn about their vision for SL being healthy for the game.
People hated 9.1, and the fact that the Activision Blizzard lawsuit was filed when people were at their most frustrated about the patch didn’t help. This admittedly had very little to do with most of the then-current Blizzard dev team, but it painted a grim picture of Blizzard’s frat boy culture and questionable leadership throughout the late 2000s/early 2010s. People hated playing WoW, and this controversy was the push so many players needed to quit the game for good.
That said, 9.1.5 was a good patch. But it was good not because it added anything, but because it specifically removed all the dumb, arbitrary restrictions Shadowlands forced onto players prior to that patch.
Eventually, Patch 9.2 rolled around and I think it gets a lot of unfair hate. It offered a LOT of cosmetics to farm for but didn’t have some absurd player power grinds like pre-9.1.5 Shadowlands did, the Zereth Mortis zone was pretty stunning, and the raid was neat. That said, 9.2 had a lot of problems as well.
9.2’s story sucked just like the rest of SL’s story. For what it’s worth, there was absolutely no way Blizzard could’ve fixed that aspect of SL mid-expansion by this point. It is what it is.
9.2 also had infamously the hardest raid we’d ever gotten prior to that point, and a raid that is still considered to have been one of the hardest raids of all time. Bosses like Anduin and Rygelon, even on HEROIC, obliterated casual AotC-only guilds by the hundreds if not the thousands, and the Mythic version of this raid burnt out WoW’s most hardcore audience unlike anything else. Sepulcher was a frustrating raid, be it for hardcore players or for casual players.
And then 9.2.7 happened, and the Fated season came into existence. If you played DF’s Awakened season (which sucked donkey balls), think this except it was actually a lot better. For what it’s worth, Fated was probably better than extending Sepulcher by another 4-5 months when people hated it a lot, but 9.2.7 was infamous because it was a relatively low-effort, buggy-at-launch patch that didn’t introduce anything new but rather recycled the previous Shadowlands raids and all the megadungeons, plus two WoD dungeons, as its M+ season. Fated wasn’t that bad (DF’s Awakened season was abysmal though), though.
But here’s the problem with Shadowlands: it actually got mostly better, at least from a gameplay perspective, but it only got better halfway into the expansion’s lifespan. If you didn’t play Shadowlands prior to 9.1.5, it’s almost impossible to explain to you just how hostile the game’s core design felt to the game’s wider playerbase. The game pre-9.1.5 felt like it was explicitly designed to make you feel like you were being punished for wanting to play the game, and that design direction killed Shadowlands for a lot of players. Shadowlands started out really rough after the first couple weeks, stayed rough for a year, and by the time it got really good many players had already written Shadowlands off, and I frankly can’t blame any of them for doing so.