the MMO industry is just going to keep making colossal failure after colossal failure of WoW clones?
Thing is, there have been extremely few colossal failures of WoW clones. I think SWTOR might be one. Because what you consider a colossal failure and what the industry considers one are different things.
Almost all of these WoW clones MMO have made back their original investment. In the world of large companies gaming, a game that pays back itself is a success. That's why they're so easy to convert into F2P format when subs drop down: you are only worried about paying infrastructure (whose costs have plummeted over the year), and getting profit, with a few % to a skeleton crew doing bug fixes and working on a small-scale expansion maybe.
So, at this point, there is still little market signal saying "stop doing those WoW-type MMOs". They still do well. It's no longer moneyprinting land, like the heady days of the noughties, but it's still good money, if you can refrain from investing too much because you have an IP that can't fail. I'm guessing we'll see WoW clones for half a dozen years at least. I mean, at that point, any industry player can make a WoW clone in its sleep, the only real costs are content production, which you offload to Korea or China.
Then, in 2020, we're going to see The Crafting of Minewars, which no one saw coming, does completely different stuff which isn't even remotely EQish, and the market will shift.