Narratively speaking Sepulcher tells two big stories; something they’ve never really done before especially in the manner that they did it. The saving of Anduin and then the defeat the Jailer, of which access to the jailer was also delayed a week “for narrative purposes” while Anduin also got a raid cinematic for his defeat despite not even being the penultimate boss, another thing never done.
The balancing of the raid was also some of the worst they ever did which is what lead to it being a three week long race which is the first time that’s happened since like…TBC? It was incredibly untested, especially in the latter half including Anduin being buggy with his stars mechanic that lead to some drama in the RTWF and then you have Halondrus who was a hilariously overtuned boss in general, but especially given where he was in the raid.
Shadowlands was also short on raid content. CN was the entry raid, Chains of Domination was the first raid tier, and sepulcher was the final raid tier. Typically there is an entry raid, and then three raid tiers; such as BFA with Uldir into BoD into EP into NWC. Or Legion with EN into NH into ToS into ABT. That’s also ignoring that Legion gave us ToV and BFA gave us CoS.
There was also datamined drustvar raid assets that Blizzard also pretends was never a thing, and maybe it never really got legs, but some groundwork was clearly laid with the potential to use them. This could have been its own raid like a ToV or CoS, or it could have been part of another raid that never really came to fruition, we’ll never know.
And not that the world first raiders are indisputable, but they are obviously very dialed in to the raiding scene and the ones who stream and discuss these topics all appear to share the same opinion that something was obviously very off with what Blizzard did for the raid scene.
The last time they did a big narrative shift was WoD which launched with the premise of the Warlords of Draenor being the big bad guys (literally in the expansion title) and it ended with us befriending Grommash and pushing back against the Burning Legion. Blizzard decided mid expansion that another Orc as the final boss didn’t feel right so they changed the story and it resulted in a massively long raid tier because they couldn’t get Legion out as fast as they thought they could. The story was borked and ultimately rushed as well.
Ok? What does that have to do with the topic at hand?