I never experienced that.
They never designated a realm for “streamers” or certain languages. Players did that. Blizzard is only concerned with having enough realms for the total population. If everyone wants to hurdle to 1 realm while another sits at low capacity, that’s not their fault. You had the option, but were trying to designate realm X for purpose Y.
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You say that but if they have 7 layers on a single server and the population is growing what else are they going to do when layering is removed?
There is but one option for that situation; divide the servers.
lol that would be more disruptive than you are imagining. they either wont remove the layering or there will be free transfers to a lower pop realm . they wont just divide servers with already set economies and social structures . that would be lunacy.
Dividing servers can be done in a lot of different ways.
Either way you slice it Layering is gone in phase 2.
A layer is a realm soft-split, as opposed to a hard-split when you permanently split up a realm. There may indeed come a time when they want to go ahead and hard-split an overly-full realm, but it surely wont be until people are into the mid-levels so they can more reliably count on the continued population densities.
There will be much more churn the lower level everyone is(people come and go, get tired of leveling, etc), but the higher everyone gets on average, the more they can count on the stabilizing and predictive population numbers that are observed.
I think layering is smart, as it gives the same effect as an ‘adaptive hard-split’ … adaptive in the sense that every time you logon or change groups is a possible inflection point to be rebalanced to a different layer that you then STAY IN IN ALL ZONES until another inflection point for your character.