Exactly what date on Varsoon does Desert of Flame unlock?

I would have to assume that a lot of the release timeline comes from splitting developer attention between live updates and Varsoon updates. Things are the way they are not because that's what the devs think that's what people want, but because that's the easiest strategy for them to manage two different timelines for development resources. Unlike with Blizzard and WoW Classic, the developers working on Live are the same developers working on the TLE. The reason that we get Dev comments on Discord like "we don't have enough bandwidth to handle improved itemization for DoF" is because the Live expansion is coming out in a few months and that's where all of the effort is going.

It's not great to hear things like that, but we're absolutely going to be stuck with the timeline that the devs provided at the start, no matter how boring T5/T6 are.

That's how Stormhold worked. It was a disaster.

Even casual play left 6 weeks of nothing to do. It wasn't a great idea, as proven by the server population dip.