He could be the most intelligent player but the most incompetent game manager. They aren't mutually exclusive. I'm not saying he certainly is incompetent, but my impression from the interviews he did is that he don't understand what the players need or he's in a situation where he's at the point of no return and wind up TBC Classic Gold doubling defending and down the match layouts.

He grey parses in raid, and runs 1-3 mythic plus dungeons a week even early on in patches while his guild funnels him equipment probably.

He absolutely lives in a bubble, and I'm convinced he can not understand as many cannot who live in these bubbles but the guy is quite smart, it just doesn't apply to his existing occupation anymore.

Once upon a time that his guilds site was THE place for knowing what goes on under the hood of this game, which was headed by Ion himself and we believed we wanted someone like him to take ghostcrawlers chair at the table... However, it turns out that simply because you are really knowledgeable about something does not mean that you ought to be in charge of it.

For example say you have the best doctor in the world at your clinic, or best mechanic in your shop or whatever... Why can you stop them from performing that what they are clearly incredible at to do something similar to conducting the hospital or shop? You wouldn't, so why did people do that with Ion?

It's not that Ion isn't competent, or intelligent, or he is"playing out of his league"... It is that he is not even playing the identical sport anymore. Game manager of a match isn't the same game as what got him to cheap WOW TBC Gold where he is, that will be theorycraft understanding and application via numbers.