I think there's possibly more to it. Many, many years passed and the people asking for it changed over time. There's a big difference between, "I wish I could go back 4 years and re-experience it all" and "I wish I could go back 20 years and re-experience it all."

I also wonder if maybe they were generally correct. What percentage of people asking for WoW Classic back in the day actually ended up there?

It's kind of like if my dad encouraged me at 17 to get a minivan because I'm going to want a minivan. And then I'm 35 with kids and I get a minivan and he says, "see? I was always right!"

Another way of reasoning about it is to reframe it as a shared problem: "What should we do with the resources we're committing to WoW?" "Do WoW Classic!" probably was a wrong answer for a long time if the goal is to make the most people happy (and make the most money) rather than make the loudest people happy. This quickly gets into how users (especially tech savvy ones) generally have no clue how things work and have zero sense of the associated cost. WoW was constantly full of people with quick opinions on how hard it should be for a multi-dollar company to do certain things. No appreciation for the mythical man-style difficulties associated with distractions and pivots and whatnot.

This is such an odd line of argument. They continue to put a lot of resources into classic. Clearly it's paying off for them and there is a large enough demographic that it's financially sensible to do so. They don't run a charity.

There's a decent video of someone playing WoW Classic for the first time - https://youtu.be/NjQgoaagS-E

And it basically came down to "classic WoW was simpler and for new players provided something that modern WoW doesn't/can't really - especially the spontaneous community.

WoW started out as an MMORP, but it's really a massively single player game until you're top level anymore.

The demand for classic wow got much, much stronger after cataclysm, because then you couldn't even "pretend" anymore.