I think the intention is just that unlike in WoD, resources are not supposed to be self-sustaining. You don't get a stipend like in your garrison chest, and you can't generate resources by running missions in order to fund your mission running.

As long as you are playing actively, the rate at which you earn resources seems pretty generous. But you're not going to have a stable of alts that you never play but still religiously log into every day to queue up missions.
 

Blizzard wanted to keep the garrison minigame without forcing the player to actively check it every hour. It works fine, in my opinion, and you don't need a LOT of resources to feed your followers/missions/troops. You can easily get them from dungeons or world quests. I think they did a good job, of course I miss the easy gold but at the same time I like that everyone is running around the world doing "somethin". The game feels alive again, it's nice.

Will it last forever? Of course not. I am iLevel 834 by just running world quests and 9 Heroics. I already have less things to do, compared to few days ago (main quests, class hall quest, etc) but I still have some daily random things to do, which is good (and not boring). Even if I'll get bred in a week or two... I don't care: the expansion money was more than worth the time I spent in Legion already.

 

Some of the later Class Order Hall upgrades end up costing quite a bit of resources. If you decide to wear the Class Order Hall gear set and upgrade them to 840, that can cost some resources as well. Going from 830 to 840 is 4000 resources.
 

@ Bill

Order hall set pieces start at 810 so you need 3 upgrades (820, 830 and 840). The total cost from 810 to 840 for a single piece is 6500 Order Resources. It's extremely expensive but if the 6x and 8x set bonuses are GREAT... it may be worth the grind.

As a Hunter I think 2x and 4x bonuses are trash. The 6x and 8x are much more interesting but by the time I'll meet all the requirements I will be 850 already, I guess (I'm 835 so far with 3x pieces). I've got a nice pair of 850 pants/gloves from two world quests, I will not replace them with 2x 810 that need a LOT of resources.

6x and 8x bonuses are nice but if you manage to get 640+ pieces for free I am not sure the set pieces are worth the amount of resources (52K resources to have a full 8x 840 Hall Set).

The first raid and its juicy loot will open soon. Is it really worth dumping so many resources for a set that can't go beyond 840?
 

In the grand scheme of things, the only important part of the order hall is reaching Artifact Knowledge 25, which is 12.500 resources total orver the course of several months. Considering you could do ~10 world quests that reward resources, and come out with 5k of those, then you can see that the whole thing was meant to be light on maintenance, unlike the garrison where you were penalized by not picking up your passive 'income' (the chache).

Add to the fact that the mission table is mostly useless after you finish the campaign, and will offer maybe 1-2 missions worth doing each day, and you can see that they went into great lengths into making the whole thing very optional after a while.

TLDR; Even if you play very casually, you just need to do 3-4 world quests per week to keep the important things in your order hall running.
 

The order hall has been a little annoying for me lately. While I understand why they cut out a cache like the garrison has that actively hurts a casual player like me.

I don't have the time to play WoW everyday. I do, however, have time to play the app everyday. Playing the app makes me feel like I'm accomplishing something even if I can't log on to play. This makes me constantly resource starved though. Now when I do log on I feel like I have to do the resource world quests in order to keep up and because I have limited time I'm passing up other quests for those ones.

I know I don't have to do this and I can simply ignore this and just power my artifact knowledge but I don't want to. I do enjoy the mindless sense of progress the order hall offers. I have my followers at 800 ilvl now and the rewards are getting better so I want to keep this progress moving forward but feel penalized for playing the way I do. Thus my annoyance with the system.
 

@ Bigeye

The problem is that you don't have much time for WoW. The app is just a "plus", something that should follow the game. It's not intended to be a separate thing or a WoW replacement and I think it's fine as it is. Allowing users to do "more" on the app would make it too powerful and -on the long run- the app would become a Garrison 2.0.
 

My alts tend to be light on resources. Not much play time and lots of missions.

The 4 pce as ret is a lifesaver out in the world, particularly playing dodge the elites in Suramar. The 6pce looked awesome and lasted hours. Then I upgraded a couple of pieces to all 840 and swapped in a 7th piece and that lasted a day Sigh. But at this point resources are no longer a issue. 1k a day and I will easily make the next upgrade in 8 or so days.