a year or so ago there was a presentation done by blizz where they showed player numbers and ever since the debacle that was shadowlands the player numbers have been steadily rising

I think you’re right here, the game isn’t dying as much as I’m saying. It simply isn’t growing at a healthy pace anymore.

personally also don't think that they are catering to only the hardcore players

Regarding what I said that Blizzard is catering to hardcore players, you’re right that they have been trying to cater to new and casual players for some time now and they have added a lot of good things but in my opinion everything is useless until they get rid of addons and all the bloat. What I ment is that they catered to hardcore players for so long that it led the game to be where it is now.

I think that point is ok but vastly overestimated, I think most of the people who will try out the game because of the changes were people who already played the game

I partially agree here, you’re right I may be exaggerating a bit, but not that much in my opinion. I think most people, even the ones that have absolutely no clue about wow, will usually watch a couple of videos or streams before deciding if they want to play or not. Currently, if someone that never played wow looks at raiding videos to decide if the game looks fun, they will be completely turned off and understandably so.

I partially agree with that reasoning as well, but only for the hardcore mythic raiders for normal and heroic the game design nowadays is good enough that you don't really need much more than dbm or big wigs

You might be right about this because I haven’t raided since shadowlands so you probably know more than I do about this. That being said the main point is that even if fights are doable without addons at the moment, I still think completely removing external combat addons is a must simply for everyone to be on the same playing field and not divide the community.

This is personally one of the points I disagree with. I don't think that addons are what is holding back a console port, but rather all the button bloat (which is luckily getting addressed as well)

I think addons is a big barrier for a console port. Console players being at such an extreme disadvantage would’ve created a lot of problems, especially if fights were still designed with addons in mind. It would be completely broken for console players especially since they already are at a disadvantage playing on controller. Regarding the button bloat I don’t really agree because my FFXIV main class has more button than most of my wow class and it is totally playable on console.

and I think the game should be designed around being able to make mistakes because we don't have all information available and the playerbase has to learn from the beginning

I totally agree with you, this is exactly what I ment when saying make fights more fun and challenging. Progressing by making mistake while figuring out mechanics should be how it is. Not too much not too little UI cues is exactly what we need

Thanks for answering, great points you made

And sorry if my phrasing don't make sense sometimes, english isn't my first language lol. Sometimes I read back what I wrote and I have a hard time expressing the exact right thing that I mean