What we learned in The Rising

[Nerfworthy]

My interpretation of this years event is that it wasnt connected to future content and instead was "parody" about the dev team hardships

Mine is the same. I work in software QA for a living so a good bit of these made me laugh out loud while I completed the cheap dungeon. I really enjoyed it, and felt even more of a connection to the dev team because I can relate to these parodies in my real life as well.

[Theodric]

He said internally he got some heat for the job hints like that red vs blue thing, some coworkers weren't happy with that being in the game, so that's the reason if we don't see something similar repeated.

That's unfortunate. Given how much of a guarded secret new content tends to be, though, it makes sense. Especially since there's a heavy focus on Live Letters and gaming events to reveal key bits of information - which is in itself a fairly solid marketing trick.