I do not deny that there was a significant shift from player to shareholder focus over time. GW2 started out as a game for players to enjoy (or rather what the devs would enjoy playing. Who remembers the https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FU1JUwPqzQY?) and largely turned into a revenue engine for shareholders to enjoy. At least they are not triple dipping (box + subscription + cash shop) like ActivisionBlizzard with WoW (or ZeniMax/Bethesda with ESO), and I believe that there are still (a few) people at ArenaNet who are fighting for the players and against 100% shareholder interest.
What I meant is that there is an inherent issue with every system that gets bigger and bigger over time and that is increasing complexity which makes changes/additions harder and harder. Pretty much the only way to battle this is to refactor and/or reimplement parts of the system (or the entire system) once in a while. To me it seems that this has been largely neglected over the past years, though there have been recent announcements that they are doing just that at the moment.
Anyway, how much resources you spend on things that do not immediatley create content/revenue is a management decision and this is where it comes full circle.
My theory is that ArenaNet was fully aware that GW2’s complexity was getting out of hand and wanted the existing game to go into Maintenance Mode while creating a new game (GW3 or whatever) from scratch. A plan that was canceled by NCSoft. And now ArenaNet is forced to create as much content/revenue as possible for/from a system which is a royal pain in the ass to make changes to.
I hope that this does not come across as all negative. I still love this game. I’m just sad what it has become or rather where it appears to be heading to. If a Djinn would grant me a wish, it would be Please let GW2 (60/100 MMO Manifesto) go into Maintenance Mode and make GW3 (80/100 MMO Manifesto).