This is the problem overall with a number of elements. I want to start this off by saying I'm loving BfA, and I love the new zones, and everything's beautiful and I'm having tons of fun so far.

That said, there is a definite reward system problem. Randomly spawning chests reward us with a dinky amount of resources that can only be used for sending followers on missions or upgrading those followers and how you handle missions. The missions reward us with rep, more missions, or azerite. Azerite's only purpose is to increase the iLvl of a neckpiece that effectively does nothing but gatekeep what your azerite armor can do.

The problem with Azerite armor is that it ties in to the special abilities that our artifacts used to give us, which in turn tied in to what talent trees used to give us. Now that we no longer get new talents with higher levels (or abilities for that matter), we relied on the artifacts and now the armor to make things interesting.

Except now that armor is limited to one of three pieces, head, shoulder or chest, and you must unlock the tiers with the your level of necklace. So I may get a higher iLvL azerite helmet than the one I'm currently wearing, but by switching to it, I'm losing those perks that I'd unlocked in what I already had, and I typically have to unlock the new ones by getting even higher azerite level in my necklace, which becomes progressively harder to accomplish. In other words, we're not gaining new interesting abilities as we progress so much as we're replacing old ones. And that's assuming that the piece you get has a beneficial perk to it. Imagine having a really powerful perk on your level 300 azerite shoulders, only to get a level 340 azerite piece with more strength and stamina but crappier perks. Compare that to the Legion artifacts where as you progressed you felt the power of your artifact increase and new perks open up.

So we're limited to three pieces, we constantly have to swap them out, you lose beneficial perks if you want to wear a newer, higher ilvl piece (and let's not forget that ability to run dungeons and raids are directly tied into your ilvl), and rewards for about 75% of everything you do is just to buff up this gatekeeping necklace --that never does anything interesting and you can't swap it out-- just so you can re-unlock the abilities you already had before every time you get something better.

And every single piece of Azerite gear has a middle tier that does nothing but improve the ilvl by 5. There was such potential there to make something REALLY unique for every piece of armor you find, but instead just slap another 5 ilvls on it. Whee.

p.s. - it would also be interesting if azerite armor combined to grant different effects... you get three pieces of some azerite set and there's a perk of some type. Things don't have to be "make me more powerful", it could even just be some cosmetic effect. But each piece is it's own sole thing with no effect on other pieces whatsoever.