Let's say WC3 had been a smashing technical success and it delivered everything everyone wanted in terms of the remastered graphics etc, it still wouldn't have

Let's say WC3 had been a smashing technical success and it delivered everything everyone wanted in terms of the remastered graphics etc, it still wouldn't have been very successful. Their legal team forced the ToS to include a clause where they claim any and all player-made content, stories or intellectual property belonged to Activision-Blizzard and not to the modders who made them. They did this because they believed they "lost" DOTA to Valve, instead of realizing that DoTA originally helped them sell a lot of copies of WC3 and they had no moral right to the IP anyway, something the courts recognized, thankfully. I have a wild theory that no honorable veteran Blizzard dev actually wanted to work on Reforged because they knew about Legal's position and therefore knew Reforged had no chance of actually matching it's former glory days. The chance that a lot of modders would want to create content for it were effectively zero.