Essences on alts only magnify and shed a light on a bigger design problem: Blizzard's insistence that we must do ALL of their content and attaching a power reward to EVERYTHING.

I've heard more cynical voices in the past like Preach say that Blizzard doesn't trust you to do their content if it's optional, thus they must attach something to it that will make you do it. Essences are just the final form of that. Blizzard wants you to do all of their content and wants a carrot to be there for everything but that carrot always contains character power unless you're talking about pet battles or cute side things like the bee mount.The issue is when the content is so bad that the only reason you'd ever do it is the reward. This ends up with you doing (and RE-DOING) a lot of content you hate and really lowering the overall enjoyment of the game. Don't do it and you don't get to have all your power gains, thus again lowering your enjoyment of the game either way. It's damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario.This isn't a big MMO world where you can do whatever you want. It's like, do you want to do this one thing and be really good at it? Well tough, you have to do literally everything else as well. So you can't really focus and specialize while also being optimal. You don't have the freedom an MMO should have.Even if Blizzard is coming at this from the more innocent angle of rewarding players who do everything, power gains are not the way to do that. Mounts, titles, transmog, pets are already there. One guy can ride around on their gladiator mount with their famed slayer of Azshara title and their 3.5k raider io score that's not even included in the base game as a lasting achievement, Blizzard. He's done it all, he gets to do that. He's done rep grinds? He gets all the exalted mounts, even the paragon mounts. He gets stuff for doing everything. Essences aren't required to reward that person.It just seems like Blizzard is afraid of making big content they release optional. Maybe that's cynical but it sure seems that way.While Essences are the ultimate joke in making you do content you never wanted to do, it did not start there. Let me give you other examples.Warfronts - They gave Heroic ilvl loot even though they had less challenge than LFR. How many people would do more Warfronts if that wasn't the case? I'd still probably go for the mount but that's a cosmetic. That item could be azerite, thus residuum, good for mains. And it was very good for getting alts ready. Which means I've done way way more warfronts than I ever wanted to do and that content has zero replayability.Islands - Honestly I think they're fine when they are optional. Good mix of cosmetics especially with the 8.3 boxes. But when they're the best infinite source of AP, you run into issues. Mind you, endless Maw of Souls in Legion was basically that except even more dull. You'll always fall into that trap if you can't balance AP properly or put a cap. If they didn't give AP I'd argue they would be more well received.The gear situation between the three pillars - Raids/M+/PvP. Chances are you don't like doing all three. Yet because they share gear you have a very solid reason to. Mostly as far as Trinkets and sort of Azerite is concerned. And with stuff like guaranteed corruption from the weekly chests, you kind of have to get both if you're missing your best corruptions.Visions - While a great feature to get all the cosmetics and achievements, the fact the item that adds sockets to gear is attached to them means you're not getting away from that. It's great that item exists, but it could've just been acquired as a drop or something.Uldum/Vale Dailies - Give quite a lot of more visions (1.7 per week as Alliance right now) and will be BUFFED next week. This ties into the above point. Until you have your bis gear with sockets, you are not getting rid of these.And with Essences we've seen another aspect addedReputations - With 8.2 reputations now actually have a power gain. While the launch reps only gave gear that you outgeared by the time you could buy it, now they tied essences, thus power increases to them. Because apparently just the mount at exalted isn't enough anymore.All these things are way more noticeable on alts because you don't want to be re-doing everything on alts. You usually just want to play them in content. You might have done the quests and reps on main once anyway for cosmetics and achievement but you wouldn't have done them on alts.When content is optional you actually feel good doing it too, because it's up to you. When the game decides for me that I should be doing something instead of what I actually want to be doing, that actually sucks. And the solution is simple: trust that cosmetics are reward enough.