Generally speaking, the thing with immersive features is that you can easily make a solid, and indeed rational, counter-argument for all of them. It usually sounds fine and convenient on paper. After all, they’re rarely Needed. Its when you’ve removed them all that you notice it affecting the overall feel of the game. A good example that comes to mind is when WoW added the cross-realm dungeon finder. Sounds very convenient with no travel time or LFG interaction. The side effects? You were essentially no longer existing in an expansive fantasy world, and people stopped socializing outside of guilds. They meant well by removing the immersion of travel, and had good arguments for it, but the costs were essentially the start of the decline of WoW’s popularity.
Thats not to say that streamlining has no place in gaming whatsoever, but in RPG’s it’s rarely a good thing. Again, just generally speaking.
I agree with your assessment of what was done in WoW. I always liked larger, more open environments in those types of games and disliked waypoints and such (but they are needed with all the bad quest designs requiring so much running back and forth).
The immersion-tedium spectrum is broad and we all can being to draw a line in different places. For example, I like the idea of not being able to carry around sacks of gold and multiple sets of armor and weapons, but instead, having to make decisions on what to take and what not to take. For others, that would just result in a lot of running back and forth, though. There is no wrong or right answer here. It's just that a lot of these things seem good on paper, but don't end up that way in practice.
