Nano gave a full story on what happened with Nostalrius:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3Nm7fc0IlM
In short they wanted to make a movement with the amount of players they had - so they made the petition. Then they shut down and wanted to donate stuff to Elysium which made Blizzard freak out as they were already making Classic and didn’t wanted a high capacity implementation of vanilla floating around - private investigators and alike 
And today they are adding level 58 introduction quests to TBC beta builds. RIP fresh, RIP no-shop.