No, server merges and closures are a sign the game is failing.
Oh god you couldn't be more wrong here. For one people fucking pour their lives into this game and absolutely use it to validate their self worth. Secondly while not as bad the governments we have are still extremely shitty. We're not above China or Korea at all trust me. Besides the jump potion has nothing to do with being competitive, it's for people who wanna catch up and play with their friends without doing dozens of fetch quests that's all.
You will not see server closures and merges. People already complain about the ghost towns some servers are. They are locked into those unless they give SE cash. WoW actually has quite a few dead servers and no real plans to shut them down. The cross server group system that is coming is a copy of WoWs. When I ask why people stay on dead WoW server always same response cross server system is good enough to get all casual gaming done.
The story jump potions are a bandaid fix in cash shop form. They really should have just cleaned up bits of MSQ, especially 2.1-2.5. Its the sniff the chocobo/fix my earrings/deliver food filler quests that kill the motivation to reach current content.
So far the cons outweigh the pros. It would be foolish to implement something like this, although I do agree the MSQ needs to be trimmed.
I think you and many others misunderstand how much development time it would take for SE to fix a lot of these issues without resorting to a cash shop item. For any sort of content you want to do, dungeons, quests, raids, etc. There are only a couple flags. Usually two: meeting the minimum level (or ilvl) requirement, and having completed X quest. Why would it be difficult for SE to remove those flags from all previous expansion content and make it so that anyone can, on patch day, proceed with the 4.0 MSQ.