I really don't see this as 'caving' at all. In general Wrath seems to be very much about bringing quality of life improvements to the player base... questing has gotten a lot nicer, leveling to 80 is much easier than leveling to 70 was (and leveling in general has gotten much easier). Intro raids and instances have been retuned, a lot of spells and abilities have been reworked to be much less annoying to work with. It seems that basically the game itself is getting a 'class review', where the devs sit down and look through it and say 'is this doing what we want?'

For instance, the tiny mana cost of Vampiric Embrace was removed, a welcome change. It makes no sense to have a spell cost 52 mana when basically every level 80 Spriest has well over 14k mana. The change to the Inner Fire duration was incredibly welcome as well. It's all the little things...

How many years has the Hearthstone cooldown been what it has been? Now, why did ghetto-hearthing exist in the first place? It was a way to get around the hearthstone cooldown. Way back in vanilla this was a way to get around flight time or riding time. Now a days though we have portals to major hot spots in two cities to cut out travel time as well as flying mounts in the new zones, and with the new expansions being released in areas that aren't adjacent to current areas, it makes travel time a much more apparent. I think the devs sat down and decided that if they made hearthing to these portal-equipped cities easier, maybe ghetto-hearthing wouldn't be necessary. Since the restrictions on traveling have already been eased so much, it doesn't make too much sense to keep hearthing quite so restrictive.

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