People had the opportunity to WOW Classic TBC Gold swap queue time short for a long time. But they didn't. They didn't make use of the free transfer servers. This isn't really an issue for me as the majority of people play their preferred side or even where their buddies are. Hard to change that.

"I want to play with friends" is a terrible argument to not have balanced servers or BGL pools. The change to factions would allow them to play with their friends as alliances, rather than playing in horde.

Transferring servers is always difficult. It's impossible to know whether your targeted realm is as good as your previous and it does not matter if you have no queue, it can be a disaster, even if it's there isn't a dead world. Vanilla was the first time I saw this occur. My guild relocated to a new server, and the number of players dropped to around a hundred people during the peak times.

While it's true that people have never been able to buy WOW TBC Classic Gold swap characters with other characters in the past, they could have if they felt the queues would be too long.