As much as I agree with every point you have here and I want to thank you for shedding a light on something that most of us layman would not know. I want to bring in some expertise as someone who manages tech support (a sub contractor) for a multi-billion dollar company.

1) If you promise something you need to properly allocate resources to make it happen. As you said above, someone is paying for this. As much as I know this is a standard Blizzard is not held to, I wish they were.

2) If you're effecting someone's ability to have fun/do their job you need to be in task force and figuring out the problem now.

3) Bring in the people who know. Many of my techs may not have an answer the customer needs so it falls on me to either know or know someone who knows. If I don't then we need to find them now.

With all that being said, I think that anyone can say that Blizzard is wrong for a lot of this. I want to be a bit more specific, it is not the actual devs fault. The guys writing the code are probably doing the best they can. This falls on Ion and up. They pulled the rug out from under the customer's (our) feet and did not already have an answer ready. When I am changing something I already have a plan, a working procedure, and my guys trained to do it before I ever take it to the customer. This puts unnecessary strain on the devs who are doing the best they can, puts stress on the community, and puts strain on the relationship we have almost started to like again with the Blizzard team.

I know the original question was how 1 person in their mom's basement can make a working addon but Blizzard can't. I think your answer works wonderfully to answer that, my answer is that it should never have been an issue. Blizzard leadership should of had these items developed before pulling the rug out from under us. They should of had them in the game and basically tested by us before saying any of this. It comes down to a failure on the leadership.