How would you fix WoW’s intra-expansion scaling problem?

World of Warcraft has a problem with how much we scale during an expansion. When my latest alt made that final ding in the sands of Vol’dun, he was at item level 278. My main is a Heroic raider and his item level is 476. Mythic raiders have even higher gear. We’ve gone up over 200 item levels over the course of a single expansion.

That is not sustainable so the developers implemented a stat squish. We saw our first stat squish in Warlords of Draenor. In Battle for Azeroth, we got both a stat squish and an item level squish.

Now, in Shadowlands, the very next expansion, we’re receiving a stat squish, item level squish, and a level squish. While the number squish solution has worked in the short term, it isn’t working in the long term. We’re merely kicking the can down the road.

Item levels in all content tend to follow Raid gear. Raid gear item levels are driven by the four difficulty levels: LFR, Normal, Heroic and Mythic. Each one must award gear sufficiently better than the next easiest to justify the increase in challenge. Then, when a new Raid tier is released, it must award gear sufficiently better than the previous tier. All those item levels add up, and before you can say “BoP the Tank”, we’ve burned through 200 ilevels in one expansion.

In the Shadowlands item level squish, your 475 gear will become item level 130, the current ilevel of Mists of Pandaria gear. Even if we get through WoW  10.0, the expansion after Shadowlands, without a squish, it will almost certainly come again in WoW 11.0.

Is there a better way, or is this scaling problem just a part of a computer Role Playing Game with the requirement of constant player power progression? How would you change ilevel or gear such that these constant squishes aren’t needed? Do you think the next raid tier has to offer better ilevel gear for players to run it, or is the challenge itself appealing enough?