No, I think you give Blizzard too much credit. There is no Machiavellian scheme at work. They are just disconnected from most of the player base and do things they want to do rather in response to what the player base wants.
Internally I am sure there are some misguided people inside blizzard that have forgotten the lessons learned from 15+ years of development and so are repeating the mistakes over again. There is also a vocal minority of players that parrot those views.
Hopefully wotlk is DOA and this they are forced to patch it in later… its a shame it takes massive sub losses before blizzard are forced to do what players want though.