no the 2.2 was clearly an attempt to please Hardcore player and raider. that was complaining that the game was too casual. old player that love grind must be happy, sadly grind was never fun.
i'm an hardcore gamer, i spend really a lot of time in the game. but i can admit when a grind is stupid and not fun (i'm at my second atma weapon just for the skin)

RNG/Grind are the level 0 of the difficulty that you can make in a mmorpg. for a long time it was the only thing that company was able to offer for keep player in them game while waiting new content. often coming after 6-8 month of waiting.
there we simply wait 3 month... then what is the point of grind that will take age at complet, since the content after 12 week will be increase. indeed we can argue that it give a long term goal. but still you have many way to do it. we have acces to a better technology than at the time of WoW debut or FF11. maybe time to use it. we can do an old fashioned game and still bring new type of content.