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Because it contans all of the material necessary to run a Wilderlands campaign, without spelling out an encounter for every map hex, and thus leaving little for individual GMs to fill in themselves. It's broad strokes of abstract verus paint-by-number detail.
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The Wilderlands Boxed Set leaves a a very wide scope of material for the GM to fill in themselves. Take a look at the examples of map entries I included in my review. An island occupied by a Green Dragon is written up in a couple sentences. It's left up to you to map and key the ten-level dungeon occupied by the dragon. A mining village in the grips of a gang war gets about four sentences and the base stats for a couple NPCs. The makeup of the gangs, layout of the town, details of the rivalries, etc. are left up to the DM. The entry for a swamp cites some of the monsters who live there, including feral humans, and that's it. It's up to the DM to map the swamp (if he feels it's necessary), stat out the feral humans, and write up a detailed encounters and lairs.
I have a rough outline for a Wilderlands campaign sketched out. I used Boxed Set entries to provide kernels of adventures stories, then I strung together several of these kernels into a series of adventures linked by theme and some common foes. So from maybe 12 entries in the Wilderlands books, I can extrapolate a series of adventures that will run at least a hundred pages of typed material that I create myself.
The Wilderlands most emphatically does
not provide a by-the-book setting all spelled out for a DM. What it presents is thousands of encounter
sketched out in a sentence or two, that the DM can flesh out, expand, on, or link together. I'm working on turning a village description that gets two paragraphs in the WoHF and a witch's coven that gets one paragraph into a multi-session adventure with two-level dungeon that will end up being 10+ typed pages when I'm done. And the really cool thing is someone else using the WoHF may have their own version of the village of Bier and the Nighcave Coven with different maps, different stats, a different story - a different adventure altogether that shores only a basic location and a few details of NPC names and motives.