Warlords, Mists, and all that had their own launch issues, but of course launch issues are not the only, or even the main barometer of whether a release was rushed or in good quality. Many of the things I brought up WERE issues that either made the game unplayable for some characters, or were a pervasive series of low quality and unfinished content that would have benefited from having time to actually finish them prior to Live.
Dragonflight’s launch literally had people unable to complete certain quests because they’d be getting phased out mid-combat trying to complete them. Dragonriding itself was a glitchy mess that could disconnect players on both take-off and landing in any location because the server was having trouble reconciling your “momentum”. The fact that this could happen anywhere rather than being bottlenecked to the Garrison instance, or to the Jade Forest, doesn’t make it better necessarily.
You’re revising history for sure here. Azure Span had issues on Dragonflight launch, well before the patch where Fyrakk Incursions came into play.
Here for examples are posts from early December 2022, in the couple of weeks after Dragonflight launched, both talking about ongoing issues as well as making mention of it being even worse in those first few days of the expansion being active:
Here’s a Blue post from Dec 6th 2022:
As you can imagine, having an entire zone break, a zone where you need to go through the zone to level up, and complete the campaign, is just as much of a blocker as hitting the Garrison intro and coming up to a broken flag or Instance Not Found.
There are plenty of comments peppered around from people noting back in December and November '22 that Dragonflight was one of the worst experiences they had encountered, or had extreme issues from poor optimisation. Aside from WoW forums, there are reddit posts, tweets, etc. etc., that are all STILL able to be found.