[2020] Things I've had to accept recently:

• GW2 is not going to last forever and at some point the game has to end live development.
• in game mount skins would be nice but also has the potential to put a big enough dent in the gem store skins to actually hurt Anet, so it will never happen unless the skin itself is underwhelming compared to expectations.
• truthfully, this game has given me every experience i have ever wanted out of an mmo. My parents bought me and my sister WoW years and years ago but we could never play it because they didnt realize it was subscription based and (thankfully so i could have a life) were never going to pay 30 a month for me and my sis to get addicted to video games lol. so we stuck to ps2, xbox 360, and eventually she stopped having time for video games while i got into gw2 at launch because i only had to buy it once. however one experience i have been waiting so long to have is actually mass transporting a bunch of people like being able to pilot a ferry in WoW to take people to other places. I would LOVE to do that even just once in a story mission for the novelty of it.
• if it was subscription based i would have NEVER tried it before core tyria went free to play. Buy-to-play, plus all the mechanics and physics and freedom of movement that we already had at launch, is what made me stick to this game. Anet felt like the renaissance-era Apple from when the ipods and first iphone were dominant, and GW2 felt like it had that level of quality, polish, innovation, and passion behind it.
• Anet has had to sacrifice other parts of the game to streamline development and save their content cycle from imploding ever since HoT, not just recently. I used to ignore this because I was so sure there was a good reason but 5 years later we know all too well that there were never any good reasons, just reasons deemed unavoidable by the situations Anet has found themselves in over the years.

i may add to this list but right now its just thoughts ive had