They fell quite short of this description. And it is definitely not ever-changing. I have seen the same floors, same layouts over and over.
I also wish to thank you for putting time and effort into your thoughts on the video and asking for discussion, rather than just posting the video with no insight or direction. It is a good thing to see here and I hope it brings good discussion. 
So. It’s a bunch of layers of “difficulty” with soul ash as the reward… How about add another layer…
Layer 9. No soul ash but random loot…
With Layer9, I guess they could tune the difficulty and loot to something like how the level 55-60 dungeons/raids were back in vanilla before BC… I mean they kind of were advertising it as a similar experience for a solo player. That would pretty much cover most of the issues people seem to have in my opinion. This way, you are running torghast for the game, for something to do in your downtime, with the prospect of possibly getting some reward, but no guarantees, rather than for some currency system or chore.
No. Torghast never awarded loot, even in alpha. There were “placeholder” items but they just said “[PH] Torghast Boss Loot” along with “[PH] Legendary Component” and Condemned Soul Essences. You couldn’t do anything with them; it wasn’t a piece of gear.
As for the video the OP is talking about… well, a lot of streamers did a really good job selling everyone a bag of magic beans, when it comes to Torghast. Personally, I never saw the appeal, it was boring even in alpha. In terms of play experience (outside of TC), alpha Torghast is pretty much what we have now. I think the differences are overstated.
Sounds like a classic case of bean counters stomping on the devs necks for time played metrics.
I dunno about that. Remember that Torghast was originally meant to have a timer, but there was a HUGE outcry from people who demanded the ability to wait 10 minutes for Bloodlust on every floor, instead. (No, seriously. People complained that they should be able to do that, if they wanted to.) So instead of the timer, we got the “death counter” instead.
Originally the Tarragrue was supposed to start chasing you down after a few minutes. When they took that out, it changed the whole dynamic.
Originally it was going to have loot, because it was like Horrific Visions. When the timer was removed to satisfy the “I want to afk for 10 minutes so I can bloodlust on every pull” crowd, it wasn’t like Horrific Visions anymore.
Here’s a thread from people celebrating the change and talking about how much Blizzard was listening to its players.
(Thread hasn’t aged well. Heh.)
Torghast was supposed to be Hades for WOW.
Except WOW is not fast paced enough to be Hades, and has to be significantly more forgiving than roguelikes tend to be in general.
Hades is also much more rewarding where Torghost isn’t when you fail.
we pay by month not by hour.
less traffic spread across more months is what they make money on. not you occupying serverspace 24/7. you playing one login per month is the true moneymaker.
this rumor is … not even a good one.
Regardless of it being right or wrong, I can’t bring myself to say Torghost is well designed when you have games like Hades as an alternative.
I always thought Blizzard touted it as something similar to D3 Rifts where solo players could get decent gear.
Unsure how it turned out as i dont own SL or play retail.
It turned out terrible and with no gear.
it’s part of the legendary gear - the highest quality gear available.
it was actually done decently well. would you rather have collects shards from bosses for 3 months again instead?
They could have added a lot more rewards. Make people look at it and go hellz yeah bud I wanna do a run so I get ALL THIS STUFF. Some TC levels give literally NOTHING for spending 2 hours in there. Just looking forward to and being 1 step closer to the mount you can use in the maw after you’ve completed every level. In the past I’ve done some and after all the time spent my character can’t kill the boss. That just felt stupid.
Also I did a near 3 hour Twisting corridors run then lagged out and disconnected on the last boss. I get nothing in compensation for that.
I would rather soul ash just drop from world content/pvp/mythic+/raiding and axe torghast all together personally. But if we’re including torghast then it should drop gear with the ilvl dependent on the difficulty of the layer.
would Benthic Gear be an acceptable solution?
I’m probably in the minority on this, but I liked benthic gear. Especially on alts.
I actually enjoy torghast, but the rewards are horrible. Putting rare mounts in for TC or end bosses of a wing or even cosmetic gear would help or SOMETHING besides ash. It’s amazing that they made the reward system so bare bones for a feature they hyped up as a major part of the xpac. Hell at least Warfronts gave heroic level gear and warfronts sucked and Island Expeditions gave tons of mounts/pets and Island Expeditions REALLY SUCKED.
Blizzard needs to get off their butts and do a minor update with some actually Torghast rewards instead of waiting for 9.1 because at the very least, if they make Torghast worthwhile people can waste time in there like they did the Mage Towers for a worthwhile goal.
So many people from beta said it was a good feature and had fun in it.
Blizzard really needs to look hard at the decision process, goals, and intentions that lead to how it ended up being the way it is.
I suspect game designers had a fun feature then the upper management and finance concerns came in and group thunk it into the dirt.
It probably wasn’t unreasonable to believe that “boss loot” meant exactly that. I mean, what do raid bosses give? Loot, righ? Armour, weapons, trinkets, etc. As I say, that is a reasonable assumption and it seems to be one that a lot of people had back then.