Well, Blizzard stubbornly clings to colorful graphics, almost to the point of them being cartoony. Starcraft2 had a lot of brightly colored, rather strange looking units, and WoW's graphics are still very colorful, even after WotLK and Cata. They might keep colorful graphics as a countertrend to most games today, where the color palette is: dirty gray, dirty brown and muzzleflash/fireball.
Thing is, gothic is a bit too risky for Blizz right now because of the fact that it might be reason to push the game into M ratings. Stuff like this is why there's the (theoretically inaccessible) zone in lower Karazhan, dropped by the devs worried about content ratings.
Secondly, the thing about an Auction House is a rather good idea imho. Firstly because if you've got duplicate set pieces or other good gear, you can sell it. If you like farming (yes, there are people like this; I'm one) you can make a fair bit of gold on the AH. Having items sold for IRLmoney by Blizz (something that works decently well for Perfect World; it's the non-Asian divisions' main source of income iirc) also also cuts back on something that plagued WoW for years, and was blatantly against ToS: selling/buying ingame stuff to/from other players for IRLmoney. Which would lead to a) account theft, b) banning or c) all of the above.
Thirdly, always-online DRM is no real issue. If you've bought the game, why care?! If you're planning to pirate it, wait about a half year. You'll be getting cracks that create fake servers emulating Blizzard's DRM systems and loop the game's DRM checking back to itself and all sorts of inventive workarounds. Hell, EA tried this very same thing with TW4. Where there's a will, there's likely someone from the cracking scene fiddling away at protections.