They were desirable, but get it through your head that only a MINORITY asked for them. You would have a few posts here and there about the implementation of arenas, but rarely did they ever receive traction because most players wanted more expansive, collaborative, and skilled PvP, and they certainly never asked for the removal of ranked 8s for arenas. Plus there was even a HATE thread about arenas that listed MANY astute points on how flawed the 4s meta would be in this game.
Moreover, anyone who did ranked 8s were not bad. Ranked 8s objectively takes more skill than 4s, and on the bright side the meta is easier to balance, fix, and improve.
One of the main reasons the ranked 8s community was small was because of how cliquey it was. I'm pretty sure Pistols summed up some other points earlier in this thread or in another but there's no reason to beat a dead horse on this topic.
However, if you're going to be ignorant of the facts then more power to you.
In addition, just to shed some enlightenment on the popularity of ranked 8s vs. ranked 4s, the community for the 8s meta was much larger than the 4s. Team ranked 4s is dead and since Wildstar was the nail in the coffin for any serious PvP in this game it's getting hard for even solo ranked on basically every server to pop consistently.