After expansions that bottled us up farther and farther into capital cities, Blizzard aimed to make Mists of Pandaria get us out in the world. They employed a number of strategies to do this - some of which were successful and some less so.
In 5.0 itself, we got a few takes on this. Valor Rewards were now also gated through reputations, and rep could only be gotten through Daily Quests. Some of these were more successful than others. Infamously, the Golden Lotus - which tended to take the most time per day of any of these factions - was also a prerequisite for starting work on two of the other reputations, requiring you to first become revered with them.
The Farm, Sunsong Ranch, was a pretty revolutionary feature that was gated behind daily quests, but continued to be quite useful afterward. Allowing you to first farm ingredients for cooking, and later for all the major professions, the Farm created a new and reliable way to gather materials in a way that was both reliable and also noncompetitive.
The daily quest chain in 5.1 with the new faction was actually not all that functionally different from the 5.0 ones, but the way that one-shot story quests were woven into the reputation climb made it very popular.
5.2 added yet more daily quests, but it was here, on the Isle of Thunder, that we started to see the concept of outdoor content evolve. Beyond the daily quests and the realm-progress (similar to Quel'danas,) there were also unusual things you could farm, summonable bosses, unique area-specific buffs, hidden treasure boxes, and a repeatable solo scenario that could net you lots of gold and supposedly epic loot (though I never saw anything like that drop there.)
Battlefield Barrens, with 5.3, was kind of "Questless Outdoor Content Mk. 1." There was a quest, which was weekly, that required you to gather tons of material from the various Kor'kron forces in the Northern Barrens, but you had a lot of control over how long you wanted to spend there. You could even hoard extra material for the following week. There were special gear tokens that could be farmed up (though you needed an item from the weekly quest in order to activate them.) Rare spawns functioned as mini world bosses, and there were events (sadly that involved escorting - that grave sin of game design) that would pop up.
The Timeless Isle that came with 5.4 was "Questless Outdoor Content Mk. 2," and improved greatly on the Battlefield Barrens model by having far more interesting interactions. There were many secrets to be found, and tons of pets and toy items to clog our inventories (looking forward to that new UI element.) It became a great way to catch up in gear on neglected or new alts, and given the much higher drop rate of Lesser Charms and the location for the new World Bosses, it became an attractive to mains as well.
So what we went through was a kind of evolution. Daily Quests provide structure, but they also gate content. Gating content has, itself, benefits and problems. We were questing through the Golden Lotus, and later the Shado-Pan and August Celestials, long after we first arrived on Pandaria. As exciting as it was to finally take the fight to Garrosh (especially for Horde players, who had not had a chance to oppose him yet,) Battlefield Barrens was so skeletal that there was not much incentive to keep at it.
The Timeless Isle was, I think, a vast improvement on Battlefield Barrens, but the lack of gating led to a certain "oh, that's it?" feeling. Yes, it might take you a while to gear up to the point where you're ready to take on those elite Yaungol (indeed, the super-tough ones that populate the Ordon Sanctuary are only soloable if you perform flawlessly,) but once you've done a tour around the island, it's less about discovery than simply grinding, whether that be Timeless Coins, Epoch Stones, Lesser Charms, or Shaohao Reputation (and I pretty much gave up on that.)
The Timeless Isle, perhaps fittingly, had very little of a sense of progression to it. It is one whole place held in stasis, and you can examine it in any order. It's thematically consistent, but there's nothing very visually distinctive about the place other than the cool Celestial Court, and there's not much about it that gets you excited to return, other than the prospect of getting absurdly awesome gear off Ordos.
But on the other hand, there's a double-edged sword to this sense of progression. People generally liked the 5.1 Shieldwall/DO quests and story, but did anyone continue doing those dailies after the big confrontation between Anduin and Garrosh? Progression requires constant movement, and Blizzard, not having infinite resources, can't have every feature go on forever. Or at least, they can't update it as quickly as we can consume it.
So what's the model, then, for moving forward?
If I had a perfect answer, I'm sure Blizzard would snatch me up (well, if I had a perfect answer and could communicate it to them succinctly with the implication that I would be able able to come up with more such solutions.) To me, it seems that there must be some kind of marriage between the freedom and exploration of the Timeless Isle with a kind of story progression. Ideally, you'd have a complex story that takes you months to play through, but I don't think that's possible to build fast enough to keep up with your players.
But I think you could go for more of a sandbox feel in your world, while making quests feel more like, well, Quests. Quests in WoW are literally anything an NPC tells you to do. Sometimes, a quest is something that fits that word - go slay the great beast that is threatening our village! Go learn under the apprenticeship of this wise master! But sometimes it's really just some subset of a quest: Go talk to this dude. Or sometimes it's a very minor task: Go collect ten berries from piles of goat poo.
I'm not saying these small-stakes quests aren't important. Indeed, the major quest chains are really more what you would, outside of the context of a video game, call a Quest. But I think we could imagine more Quest-like quests in a more randomized, sandbox world.
Given that we'll have these little satellite outposts in the various zones that are linked to our Garrisons (though I imagine these will be more standard leveling quest hubs,) I'd like to see more decisions for us to make. Perhaps we get there and decide we need to take a strategic location. We might choose a hill that would be a good place for a fortress, or perhaps instead we might choose to build a fortified bridge over a narrow part of the nearby river.
We could then have quests where we scout out the given location and establish a perimeter. From there, though, the traditional quest format could shift to one more like the Timeless Isle. Now that we have this base of operations on that hill (because screw rivers!) the surrounding area is ready to be explored. From there, you could fight the local Arrakoa, or explore a cave someone found at the foot of the hill that might have valuable ore, or perhaps house some nasty Gronn.
The idea I'm trying to get at is that as one quests through the zones, instead of just leaving them behind, each major chain would unlock a kind of mini-Timeless Isle. There's a sense of story progression that way, and you get to move on to the next quest hub if you're not that interested in it, but if you have been having a blast fighting across the tree-cities of the Arrakoa, you can keep exploring the Spires of Arrak some more before moving on to, say, Gorgrond, without feeling like you've hamstrung your own leveling or character-progression.
If they succeed in making the entirety of Draenor fun to explore after the quests are complete, I think we'll have seen the game take a big step forward.
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