People's expectations about Watch_Dogs were already shaky by the end of the actual reveal trailer when he pulled out a gun and started shooting. Ever since the start it felt like there was a discussion about whether Ubisoft, of all companies, deserved the benefit of the doubt regarding a new IP at the beginning of a new generation, and whether the hacking stuff would be an innovative twist or just a meaningless gimmick where you'd get randomly generated profiles and do the same stop light/black out/bridges type tricks over and over. If you honestly were still excited for WD as some next gen vanguard even like a year (at the very least 6 months) before the game came out, then that seems more like on you than on the game, because all of the warning signs were there, and "the game looked pretty graphics wise in a scripted demo at E3 2012" doesn't cut it.
Destiny was a bill of goods that was so shocking that even people who weren't actually interested in Destiny had to stop and rubberneck at it after release, like, "Shit, what the fuck happened there!?" Even the people rocking the more realistic "it's just Borderlands with Halo shooting" expectations weren't prepared for the loot shit, or the bonkers writing, or the Donkey Kong Country 1 "we took an enemy and made it big, now it's a boss" bosses, or Guard Dinklebot While He Does a Thing Mission #127.
If you're going to argue that Watch Dogs was a worse game, then sure. But in terms of the gulf in mindset immediately before and after the final release (ie, the things that most people would consider factors in "disappointment") I think Destiny was far in the lead there.
