Welcome to open beta.
My belief is that the day was to polish bugs and covenant abilities. Blizzard has announced multiple times that you need to complete side quests or you’ll get trapped while leveling. I’ve read several PSAs.
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Well, this is not good to hear. I started by doing all the quests in Bastion but I was starting to get annoyed because I thought we were just getting tastes of each zone and then we would get to pick our covenant so I started to stick with only the main story quest. The main story should give enough XP to hit max imo. I really don’t want to go back to Bastion and I’m not even out yet. 
The delay was not for one specific reason. There were many issues regarding covenants, skill balancing and a myriad of other issues from development to game direction that needed ironing out, not just particularly leveling.
The point of the discussion is the answer to your question in the thread title; “what was the point of the delay?” You are presuming that the leveling process was the one and only reason, which is incorrect. The large majority of the answers and resulting discussion has been on point, whether or not you believe it to be…but even if they weren’t, no one person (except a Blizzard moderator) is privileged above any others to determine what can or can’t be discussed on a public forum.
In other words, if I were to say this thread was now all about how ridiculous the prices being charged for the High Society Top Hat on the auction house are, you have no authority to stop anyone from discussing it.
Here.
This was posted last week and i found it very informative. Hopefully it helps.
And yet here I am, 4 bars from 56 and logged out having just finished Bastion. Lol You can hardly fault Blizzard because you ignored hundreds of quests while you steamrolled through the main story.
God forbid you have to do a couple hours of side questing or dungeon queues before not having to level again for 3ish years. The absolute horror. Lol
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I’m fine with not being able to hit max level from just speed running the story quest. There is nothing wrong with dungeons and side quests.
Sounds like you just don’t know how to enjoy the game and just want to blaze through everything. I’m level 58 at the beginning of the 3rd zone. Have done a few side quests and got lost in the beautiful zones for a while just exploring. I just got to Ardenweald and man… What a beautiful zone. Love everything so far. I thought I was going to hate Maldraxxus but I’m honestly excited to go back there and explore more.
It wasn’t delayed specifically to fix a numbers problem.
Lots of stuff still had content not available in beta. It just wasn’t ready for many reasons. I found bugged mobs even today.
And even more absurd that you complain that you shouldn’t have to do the available quests to cap.
It said that in my quest log, but I just ignored it and the npc 3still there anyway to take me to ardenweald
I ran into that at lvl 53, so I did a few side quests n skinned n mined a bit. Seemed odd, but the War Campaign in BFA was gated behind levels too. We just didn’t notice cause most of us were max level by the time the whole campaign was out.
My quote got liked so I’m brought back to this thread, but, this is the released statement for the delay:
The delay was to… “polish the expansion and shore up the endgame, including overhauling the combat and rewards in the Maw, and reworking the Covenant systems to make your choice more immediately impactful and have clearer long-term goals”.
It has nothing to do with you not being able to reach level 60 w/o doing side quests. 
Thanks for the recommendation!