I’ll give this to you. Apparently the game stagnated somewhere around 5-6 million users per expansion.
ZT existed back in the day on the old forums. And for Vulpera we have several topics even in the mega topic listed, back in the day, when they weren’t playable. Vulpera had a LOT of people rallying for them. To put it in context from the topic:
Another thread about the foxes?
I googled around 2016 and the most discussions are not available anymore (apparently they were on the old forums) but MMO champion has several topics on it, including reddit. Nightborne were surely asked to become playable. There is also a bigger number of one-shot topics, like these one. So, yes, they were contested.
Sounds absolutely right and on point to me. The issue is certainly multi-faceted and yes, the Kul Tiran one is a weird example looking back (not my posting). They were in demand, Blizzard even stated that they took more work to get done and yet they are also unpopular.
These were the topics back then. And you were also wrong with the Vulpera, perhaps your memory is bit blurry here. I do remember HMT and Nightborne discussion extremely debated, because how much everyone wanted to mirror the faction races back in the day. I’ll look over the next few days if I can find these topics somewhere.
The graph also shows that ZT and Vulpera are very popular races, hence my argumentation that they were also often requested back in the day. Especially ZT since MoP.