The lack of anything exciting in the Outland crates is seen as a let-down by a lot of people. It's a missed opportunity to add that little element of surprise.
The most likely explanation is that fishing was forgotten in the rush to get TBC finished. The clearest evidence for this can be seen in the last 2 zones to be completed: Shadowmoon Valley consists entirely of useless catches, while water in Blade's Edge isn't even fishable. So the theory goes that the crates were intended to contain Outland greens, but Blizzard simply never found time to put them in.
It is also possible Blizzard decided that fishing was already very profitable, and adding potentially valuable greens to the mix was excessive.
More generally there are 2 factors that seem to dictate design decisions:
- Fear of fishing 'bots: Hence the bias to pool fishing, which is exceptionally hard to automate.
- The Social vs Gameplay pendulum: Sometimes Blizzard view fishing as an entirely social activity, and sometimes as something that is core to success in other parts of the game. The balance between these objectives seems to change, often without apparent reason.
The Burning Crusade introduced Furious Crawdad, which were very hard to catch when TBC was launched. They cooked up to provide the only +30 stamina food in the game, so became an essential buff on a raid tank. Clear example of fishing for gameplay reasons. But then the pendulum started to swing again: When the Skyguard faction first appeared on test servers, a +30 stamina buff food was found on their vendors (with Friendly reputation, which is easy to attain). Basically removing the role of fishing to provide that food. The change didn't occur, but Highland Mixed Schools were tweaked to make Crawdad fishing easier.
