Lotus availability is not at vanilla levels.

Nevermind this, WoW players nowadays have much more of a min-max mentality than they did 15 years ago. The reason black lotus is so expensive is because of the increased demand per player. Flasking, using consumables, minmaxing, these things were way less common in vanilla, because the playerbase as a whole was shit ergo not many people cleared raids -> much lower demand.

The reason black lotus is so expensive is because the spawn points are controlled by people. Every spawn point in every zone is camped by dozens of people. If youre a herbalist the chance of getting black lotus without doing this is pretty much non-existant. Whats more, AH availability is also controlled by the very same people who control the spawn points. I know a handful of guys on my server who have their banks full of black lotus, pretty much hundreds each ( and those are just the guys i know about), yet theres never more than 20-30 black lotus posted in the AH. If you increase the spawn rate to match the population increase your chance of getting one is still going to be minimal, and prices at the AH will still stay the same, because the same people who control the price now will control it still, except now they will have 3-4x more black lotus in their banks.