By all accounts retail is still played far more then classic at this point and classic still hasn’t reached the end of its life span for new content.
As far as ques goes this is because of technical issues:
You say no gating, then you opt for gating in the same post. 
I could see if, and that’s a pretty big if, they made getting useful gear drops reasonable then w/e, but with the current trend of RNG hell to the no.
it has nothing whatsoever to do with that
i have never seen this IE. what is a major reward from IE?
now this is the IE i have played.
What makes it fun to play?
It’s not a question of if it is gated, it’s HOW MANY gates?
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resource gate (why? this is horrible)
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time-gate (on top of resource, why? i dunno, but yep!)
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ilevel-gated (gotta gear up before doing hard content, ok)
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reward-gated (why we got used to having this dished out weekly is odd, but yep!)
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progression-gated (things get oddly easier as you progress having zero to do with your skill - ok, weird, but yep!)
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skill-gated (*this is the only valid gate, IMO)
If you seriously think you can just play it as much as you want, like you can with M+, I am surprised. Horrific Visions is the model they are pushing, not M+.
Cap the rewards after X amount of runs per week. Let us play it as much as we want.
Seems like a simple choice to me
Personally I’m of a different opinion, whilst decent in restricted quantities increasing their number just provides for bad gameplay.
Think of it as mobile game design, their motive is simply to get you in and playing each day to get max rewards.
Don’t log on? Don’t get the reward, fall behind.
It creates a style of gameplay that rewards distinct play patterns. The person who plays 1 hour a day but plays 7 days gets rewarded over the player who can only play twice a week but plays 10 hours during that time.
On top of that it reduces incentive of other content, why do X when currently doing Y gives you the increased bonus? Why repeatedly do Y when the bonus reward vastly outperforms the standard that you might as well only do it for the better reward?
Honestly we don’t need more Diabloesque mechanics in WoW (even though it sounds like we are getting a Kanai cube like legendary system in Shadowlands).
Diablo is an ARPG as opposed to an MMO, it lives and dies off the fact that it uses absurd RNG with countless drops to compensate for the absurd variance in power.
While there are somethings games can take from other genres it needs to be limited in a sense that it keeps it’s own identity.
Doing 4 Heroic island expeditions in a week gives you a Major chunk of Azerite. Any subsequent island expeditions rewards only doubloons, and minor amounts of Azerite.
Sorry I meant log on once a week like the island expos not once a day. So you can log on once a week doing the weeks worth, then not log back in.
That’s fair enough, I definitely think with a bit of freedom it can work which why I like the idea of the cache in Shadowlands currently.
As long as it’s not over used so things are over incentivized and conversely the actual task is less incentivized then it can be good.
It idea of one cache instead of like three and having all tasks contribute to the one and your choices in Shadowlands seems like a really good idea to me.
See, I want gates and caps.
I don’t want to feel pressured into practically living in the tower just to maximize my chances to get upgrades for the legendary stuff and whatnot out of there.
And I’m not the only one. I’ve heard there is actually going to be a limiter to entry, but I can’t find a source.
What If the Tower only gives you the Rewards the first few times in a week, But after those few runs you can continue to enter the tower just for fun?
I can understand wanting a limiter on progression. But you shouldn’t want a limiter on fun content.
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