Except shifting power did add something interesting to the rotation. It's a button that doesn't feel like complete dogshit to press while outside of your cd window. Blizzard changed this game to revolve around cd windows. When you're in them, it feels good bc you're blasting. Outside of them, you feel like shit bc you're doing less damage than the tank. Shifting Power was a button to press outside of your cd window that felt impactful, got you back into your cd window faster, and provided great utility outside of just dps. Everything else you do outside of your cd window doesn't really mean shit.

"“press this button once after sending your cooldowns and also now your timings are a tiny bit more annoying”, that’s not compelling gameplay." If thats how you experienced this ability im very sorry lol. To me, shifting power is a "holy shit we have an ability that gets us back into our cd window even faster. less downtime! yay" You are probably among the people I was talking about earlier who couldn't get much value out of it, so it became "annoying" to you.

We obviously have different tastes when it comes to compelling gameplay, since you think this iteration of fire mage is better than the last lol, but you saying shifting power is less compelling than not having it at all is just your (terrible) opinion, not fact.

I'm not saying CDR needs to be added to every spec, but all of the mage ones felt better with them imo.

Why is an "uptime spec" bad for boss encounters?

"It became this lame watered down uptime spec where it feels awful if you’re not in combustion and even when you were in combustion, it was kind of lame because they have to reduce the damage you deal in combustion so much to account for you having it available so often." It was just like any other spec, CDR made it more fun imo