I am sorry but this reaction is a bit silly, imo.
Majority of people I’ve encountered outright refuse to engage with server hubs because they attract unwelcome busibodies who have harassed, interrupted, mocked or otherwise broke the immersion for them.
The people who casually roleplay are often considered to be “cringe” by the more serious individuals and more people would prefer to stick with a solid guild or community to avoid them.
Furthermore, good majority of potential hubs become extremely difficult to traverse on a high population server like Argent Dawn because they still provide services for everyone, so areas like the Trade District can easily skyrocket to 10K ms without the need for any seasonal or limited time events being hosted.
It has, for years now, been a long time complaint that Horde is strictly bubbled to guilds and despite attempts to restore life into Origrimmar, people continue to stubbornly refuse to take it seriously as a hub. Exception to this has been an attempt to revive Silvermoon and given the upcoming glow up it will receive, I imagine we will see more activity outside of Origrimmar anyways.
Duskwood, for years, has had frequent drama due to specific guilds attempting to impose their authority onto others who fart in their general direction which has led to the initial community that had been built up eventually dispersing as people got fed up with the consistent amount of metagaming and godemoting. It now has been mostly reset and has lost its core identity.
This isn’t without mentioning that we already have people, guilds and even communities who bubble between using private servers like Epsilon and Retail, with Epsilon acting as a customisable world setting for every individual instance that is created by someone and enables them to fully rebuild Azeroth, including custom locations, buildings and fully fleshed out campaign environments.
Interesting enough, despite having questionably “superior” toolsets to Retail, Epsilon didn’t kill the roleplay community. Those people who use Epsilon still attend server events and partake in Retail content. New hubs, like Seradane, have even risen to the occasion and are growing. Duskwood now has regular events. Gilneas always has something occurring. Being given new tools to create our own environments hasn’t killed the community. It’s simply given people more ways to enjoy their roleplay who weren’t going to visit the hubs to begin with.
What you ultimately fear has happened, will continue to happen, and that change is inevitable as people’s needs grow or priorities shift. And, frankly, there has been years worth of people sharing a common sentiment that some of us are tired of having strangers, casual or otherwise, interrupt and break our immersion; people who show no consideration or respect to the atmosphere of places like the cities and show a disregard for maintaining these hubs.
Neighbourhoods can be a promising solution to long standing issues that have been present or have risen in the last six or more years for wider Argent Dawn by giving communities their own spaces to set their guidelines, to construct their own immersion levels, to choose who can be invited and who isn’t, to have varied events that won’t be impacted by seasonal or limited time content. Sharding will be toggleable with people being able to flick through multiple instances as the caps fill out.
Furthermore, because neighbourhoods offer wider controls, it will mean that many of us will no longer have to endure being bullied out of locations by problematic guilds when hosting our own events since we can construct custom environments that won’t need guilds to effectively fight over open world locations or require the usage of war mode to take advantage of sharding, such is the case currently for Ashran and Goldshire (which also bubbles the community, by the way).
As an added bonus, neighbourhoods can also encourage select individuals to hang out with their own guilds and communities which can mean we might see Goldshire slowly empty out as they learn they can construct elaborate scenery for their… activities. This can provide OOC individuals a chance to go elsewhere, undisturbed by others and able to do their thing without interruption to us.
Overall, I can see housing and neighbourshoods being a positive improvement for a community like Argent Dawn whose foundation has, for decades, been built on centralised organisation and communication through spaces like Argent Archives, Discord and these Forums.
I am excited to see players get the opportunity to construct market stalls, garage sales, pot lucks, garden picnics, weddings, funerals and other venues and events using their plots; to build their dream tavern, salon, day spa, medical clinic, bookshop and more.
I also cannot stress it enough that from what I’ve seen from Alpha, there has been a labour of love from the development team to provide us roleplayers with plenty of third places to host community events of our own and I cannot wait for people to discover these for themselves.