I agree with you. So many great side stories yet the overarching conflict almost totally ruined it for me. I wouldn’t even be here if it were not for the urging of a friend.
I get that the player character doesn’t exist in lore but looking at things were handled in BfA feels insulting. Blizz needs to put more effort into the RPG aspect of the game. I don’t read a lot of books so I’m not going to delve into their novels. Especially since that’s not why I started playing WoW in the first place. Initially I was turned off by Shadowlands but after a bit of time I feel I can ignore the story and move on as I did in BfA. If enough people feel that way and keep saying that to Blizz maybe they will make a change. We shall see.