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As someone who was quite into Heroes of the storm and was regularly a top 200 player I think you misdiagnose it's failure. The primary reason it flopped wasn't because it was too casual, it was because it was too team oriented. From the bottom up it was a game that required team coordination to such a degree that solo queue players felt they couldn't impact the end result of the match very much. Five 2k rated players on comms would beat the 3k rated player with 4 average pubs every time. In DOTA or league a carry, and they're literally called carries which gives the reasoning away, would be able to dominate their lane and then use that advantage to by them selves win the game. In heroes you can win the solo lane as hard as you want, but the coordinated team will have taken every objective and you'll be a lower level anyways. They tried to mitigate this a bit with stacking characters but those are even better with a team that can help you stack.
This makes the game hard to catch on for a few reasons:
Very difficult to stream. People watching a stream want to interact with the top player and watch them play well. In Heroes top players are all practicing comm discipline and following shotcallers which can be fun to watch but is really not the standard streaming experience.
People like to at least aspire to be the ones who carry games, this is reflected in the incredibly high pickrate of stacking abilities even when they are suboptimal. This was mechanically not supported by the game.
Solo queue play is the primary way people engage in mobas and heroes just didn't have a very good solo play experience
HotS had a really rich and deep meta game that was a ton of fun, especially because it mostly skipped the tedious laning phase and the interesting strategy started from minute one and continued the whole relatively short match without much of a foregone conclusion late game. But if you can't find 4 other dedicated players that you enjoy queuing with it was not a great experience.
Why didn't Blizzard simply ensure solo queuers are only matched up with solo queuers, and team queuers are only matched up with other team queuers?
They tried quite a few things over the years including that. Team league VS hero league. Duo queue seems like it's an unusually popular experience though and it made team league queues very long. Part of the problem is they just didn't have the player base required to split between so many queue types.
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HOTS does have some depth, but I think you are seriously underrating the skill expression of DOTA or even LOL laning and what that brings to a hardcore fan that well, listening in on comms cannot. Shotcalling and cooperation is certainly a skill, but it isn't one that gamers have really cared about, so its still a point of not understanding the audience if you build a game around it.
And lets not confuse ourselves here. HOTS might have depth, but that is wholly accidental on Blizzard's part, just like wavedashing was wholly accidental on Nintendo's part in SSBM. They set out to make the most casual of casual mobas possible to try and suck in fans of their existing IPs into a FTP lootbox gambler.
It's a very different kind of game than the others. I'm of the controversial opinion that any real time PvP game not overly filled with rng taken seriously will have pretty much unreachable depth because difficulty is derived by an opponent using the same tools. HotS trades things like the item shop and carefully last hitting minions for precise team rotation and timings being paramount. What I'm definitely not saying is that DOTA and LoL lack depth, they're obviously very deep and require very strong technical skills to succeed, which I've laid out is probably something that makes them more popular. But I always feel the need to push back against the kind of sneering reception Heroes gets as a "casual" game because someone who played thousands of hours of league loads up the game, plays it like league and doesn't understand that there are other ways to outplay your opponent(s) than last hitting/denying 10% more minions than your lane interlocutor until you can snowball out of control.
Heroes actually predates the lootbox craze and didn't have them until loot 2.0 after the game had pretty much already flopped. I know I'm sounding like a fanboy but the game really did feel like an effort of love rather than a cash grab. I'm not much of an activision/blizzard fan anymore and am well aware of their deserved soulless corporate reputation. They tried lots of weird and creative stuff that I don't think the other mobas would have to guts to do. They could have done what league did and basically just copy the style of dota allstars with some tweaks but instead they greatly changed the formula.
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