Why Limit Yourself?

Something has been bothering me recently. See, I got involved in this thread on the WoW general forums about player housing. When a Blizzard employee finally visited the thread and posted his two cents, this is what we got:

Post #1: "This has been brought up in the past but our answer remains the same. As much as it could be a fun feature for some people and we would like to implement at some point, we are currently focused on new interactive content for players to enjoy."

Someone was wondering what kind of "interactive content", so the CM (community manager) continued:

Post #2: "You are reading into it a little too much, I just meant content like dungeons and quests that a player gets involved with."

Post #3: "And quests to level from 70 to 80 and new items for professions and new dungeons for players 70 to 80 and a new class for players to use and zones to explore and a full PvP zone and siege weapons..."

And, basically, the thread digressed into calling out that CM on these comments, because basically what he was saying was that nothing but the same old thing is going to be coming down the pipeline. Sure, we're going to get "new content" in the expansion in the form of 10 more levels and new zones, but that is just 10 more levels of grinding, questing, unbalanced PVP, raiding. The same old thing we've been doing for the last three years.

I fail to see why Blizzard is so adamant about not thinking outside the box. I mean, if a new, small MMO like Lord of the Ring Online can do player housing in a very well thought out manner, surely the geniuses at Blizzard can come up with something? Why are they limiting themselves to the standard, stagnant content?

Wait, let's backtrack. I suppose I know the reason why they don't care to think outside the box - they have nine million subscribers who "like" the game just the way it is. Why should Blizzard do anything that would cost them more development time and that they're unsure about, when the current trend in content seems to be satisfying the player base?

I will tell you, one of these days an MMO is going to come along that does what WoW does, and has all these extra features - like player housing. At that point, I can guarantee you Blizzard will start doing something about their lack of innovation - and quickly. I just don't see why they need to let it get to that point.