The trick is that if they were ready to announce details regarding an Appearance Slot or Rated Battlegrounds changes or new Archaeology items or updated Character Models or a Tabard Storage System, then they would just make an announcement! They already said (somewhere) that they weren't going to use these Q&As to make huge announcements. In fact, they're probably not even sure what they'll use 'em for except to give answers to common questions in a centralized spot.

The best you are going to get out of generalized questions like new character models, appearance tab, vanilla servers and so on is going to be a general answer. Either it will be "we like the idea and are actively working on it" for models, appearance tab, etc. Or you'll get "the idea is bad and we are not going to do it" for vanilla servers and the like. You might get a bit of their thinking as to why or why not, as was offered in the "PvE/PvP rulesets" question.

You're not going to get "this is the exact plan we have for WoW for the next 5 years" so it's silly to expect that.

I fully agree we won't see better answers to those questions, which is why I wish they'd spend less time focusing on them. They have to acknowledge them since they were highly rated, but it seems too much of the Q&A was spent answering unanswerable things. Hopefully it's just a side-effect of it being the first of the Q&As and they'll avoid such questions a little better in the future.

I hope so too. The split topics should help too. Hopefully with a more focused topic than "everything ever" we can get more focused questions too.