@Popesicle

I'd be inclined to agree with you if the fun gadget love hadn't completely disappeared in Wrath. As a gnomish engineer, I have the following "new" to wrath in the fun gadget category.

1. A motorcycle that anyone, engineer or not, can own. It also requires 12,000g in non-negotiable vendor mats in addition to the farmable mats, placing it squarely in the "I have time to farm massive amounts of gold." category.

2. A belt tinker that stuns a few trash mobs in 1 or 2 encounters. Don't even try to bring up the other tinkers such as parachutes. They existed before, and blizzard pulled the incredibly stupid move of requiring that they take up the permanent enchant slot instead of giving them their own "slot".

3. Gnomish X-Ray specs....not anywhere near as fun as they may or may not sound.

4. As of the last patch, the flashlight. An incredibly inferior trinket statwise that creates a beam of light identical to many other items in the game available to anyone.

And that's it. What has a lot of engineers bitter is that BC and Wrath did indeed, have fun new flavor gadgets.

...in the collectible card game.

Robot Chicken, Rocket Mount (Which just screams goblin engineer version of the engineer flying mount), weather machine, disco machine, party grenades...etc, etc. All of them scream "these should be engineering items". And way better than the scraps that have scarcely been thrown engineers way.

Engineering wrath = crap on gadgets, -and- crap on buffs. So we've gotten a profession that now does for us almost nothing. My flying mount from BC is the one and only reason I haven't dumped it.

As for "why must all professions be equal"?

Because life isn't fair, and that's why we play games. ^_^

In all seriousness, the reason is the limited profession slots. If we were allowed to learn as many professions as we cared to spend the time and gold on, it'd be a different story. If picking up a new profession were a cheap or simple matter, again, it'd be a different story. But for a lot of us, this is something we've spent a great deal of time and money on, and "rerolling" our profs would both require more significant money and time, but...

and this is an important bit...

Also require us to lose everything we attained before. Like my previously mentioned engi mount. It requires high level engineering to -use-. That means if I leave engi behind, i can never use it again unless I once again pick up and level engineering.

In the end, blizzard must face this expectation because they created it themselves with the release of Wrath when they gave nearly all of the professions a comparable and significant self-buff and then left engineering out of that. In terms of player dissatisfaction with the state of engi and its lack of said buffs, they have noone to blame but themselves.