Need more wards.

[Jojoya]

Well Eulmore/Norv don't really make sense as they are another world entirely. Generally its a capital that gets a distrinct with the exception of SB not adding more zones. The scheme also works for SE's bottom line. How many do you think bought MSQ/Level boosts so they could bid in the empyrean on alts? Its good money for SE to make housing area's that require some effort to access with a $$$ shortcut. Thats just the way things are going and likely I suspect will continue...mind you it will probably be like 7.1 or some such.

That may answer the second part of the question but not the first.

Where are you getting information that a new housing district is coming in 7.0? They don't add a new housing district every expansion. The two districts that they have added also were opened to purchase with the x.1 patches, not x.0. To my knowledge, there has been no hint or tease that a new one is coming.

Your reply to my other point you quoted immediately falls flat because you dragged demolition into it. Demolition was not part of the original housing design. It wasn't added until a couple of years after housing was first introduced and was only added due to a large amount of player feedback about owned plots being unused while there are players who wanted to get a plot. It continues to fall flat considering the number of times SE has suspended demolition for whatever reason.

Housing does not exist to tie players to the game. It exists because it is a popular feature in MMOs and players always request it when it is absent. Happy players with things to do are what keep them tied to a game, not ownership of a house in a game they otherwise have no interest in playing. Only fools pay to retain ownership of virtual pixels in a game they aren't playing instead of spending that money on the game they are playing.

On the resource side of things, you're conflating quality and quantity. Development teams could have had members shifted from housing to dungeon but all that would have done is increased the quantity of dungeons created. It wouldn't have corrected the fundamental flaws in dungeon or combat design that made those systems unenjoyable for the player base. RIFT, as an example, had a reasonable amount of content even without housing. The problem was the content design was mediocre. It wasn't bad but it also wasn't especially good at a time when a large number of MMOs were getting released. Taking resources away from housing wouldn't have fixed that problem and likely would have led to the game dying even faster than it did (even though it's actually still operating).

Same with Wildstar. The fundamental flaw there was they wanted to make a MMO for the "hardcore" players and that's what they did. The skill gap between leveling content and end game content was massive, and housing alone was not enough for the casual players not capable of making that leap. Removing housing from Wildstar would have only seen the game shut down that much sooner because there would have been that much less for the casual players who make up the bulk any MMO's paying customers to do.