It took three days. The Forever beta opened September 17; by September 19 the addon scene had already split in two. WeakAuras does not work and its authors have stopped porting it. ClassicUI Forever sits on CurseForge restoring gryphon bars, round minimaps and 1.x windows piece by piece. Death and birth inside one beta week: the fastest culture fork in World of Warcraft history, fought entirely through addons, before the game launches.
What actually happened
Blizzard set the terms with the Midnight API restrictions: enemy health, damage numbers and threat hidden from addons, combat-decision automation impossible, built-in meter/cooldown/swing bundled so "addons should not be required." Our census has the full board: Questie shipped a Forever release, Details limps along inside the API limits, DBM is porting, WeakAuras is dead.
Read that list as two philosophies. Retail's answer to difficulty is information density: WeakAuras turns bosses into UI puzzles solved before pull. Classic's answer is scarcity: you get frames, bars and your own eyes; Blizzard picked scarcity for Forever, and the WeakAuras authors agreed by walking away: the market spoke through a retirement, not a boycott.
ClassicUI is the counter-vote
justawower's ClassicUI is the other half of the same verdict: if Blizzard won't ship a Classic interface, the community ships it in week one. Modular per element, Edit Mode-integrated, already usable with beta caveats (settings revert, stealth and druid-form issues, LUA errors). The speed is the story. Nobody waited to see whether the modern UI "grows on them." Day-three demand for 2004 frames is a referendum result, and it went against Blizzard's default.
The fault line to watch
The split that matters isn't WeakAuras vs ClassicUI, it is who Forever is for: Blizzard's design (no warning addons needed, encounters playable clean) assumes players who want the world. The ClassicUI rush assumes players who want the past, down to the pixels. Both groups bought the same beta. Launch decides which one the game actually serves, and the loser gets the louder forum.
My read: Blizzard wins this one by default. A game designed for clean play plus a community that restores Classic frames on top is the best of both, and the only casualty is the automation layer nobody will admit missing.
SOURCES: tracker addon census (Sep 20); Tavern ClassicUI report (Sep 19); Blizzard Q&A broadcast (Sep 17).