It goes both ways.
If players want vendors, the loot system currently isn’t working, if they continue to want vendors then we know it still isn’t working. In an ideal world we’d go from expansion to expansion with everyone understanding where and how to gear.
Without ranting about the pro’s and con’s too much I’ll briefly say that losing tier sets and losing vendors was a step in the wrong direction. Adding warforged/titanforging was a step in the right direction. Flooding players with loot in order to offset RNG and make titanforging work as a core game system however was a big step in the wrong direction. PvP gear got caught in the crossfire and given its limited availability in comparison to tiered raid gear that now extend their own relevancy past the tier, m+ dungeon gear, and world quest gear, the effect is felt substantially.
Realistically, there are a few thousand guilds with an average item level of 410+ , even more 400+, and I don’t know how many of those exactly are heroic+ raiding guilds but I know it’s not all of them and when your considering a player pool that massive whichever ones are casual / normal / social / pvp guilds are too significant of a number to assume they’re a minority or select few. There are enough players to say that all the gear you want can be obtained.
What is not represented easily by third party sites that aggregate player data like this are the “I only want to PvP with my character” playerbase. Players who probably put more play time in than your average player but more than likely clear less content which puts them in a situation where it feels like they’re gearing off scraps.
The [ gearing ] system suggests that players who fill the queues for random battlegrounds, for example, are the same type of casual player that might primarily do world quests. Which is why we see PvP gearing options presented as side systems to the PvE loot progression path. i.e 370 / 385 conquest rewards, 360+ world quest rewards, 385 base cache, 385 emissary cache, etc.
I don’t think we’re at the point where “nobody has a good answer or at least one that players will be happy with” because it really just seems more likely that pvp gearing is deliberately left out each time changes are made.
You saw vendors added for Azerite, you saw world quest scaling added in 8.1.5, and then again when the maximum scaling in last weeks mid-tier catch up was increased to 370 / 395 / 400 essentially allowing casual gearing options to scale up to the point where they’re equal to 1800+ rewards, War Fronts, caches, etc.
It’s not accidental to not have added some type of scaling gear upgrades to random battlegrounds.
I can’t comment on how much “immense negative customer feedback” matters to a specific person, or a company, but I know that when it comes to things like metacritic they do have some impact on future decisions.