Well, frankly you don't really "learn" your character that well while doing a turbo-leveling-hurdle to get to end-game raiding asap. I for instance have ended up using about the three main nukes/moves or each character type I have as alts and just bruteforced my way to 80 and only then can one really begin learning how to _play_ that character class.

Heck, still today I haven't healed even an HC with my priest even thou he's dual spec shadow/holy and farming Naxx-25 at the moment. I'm still learning how to do the shadow priest button/macro dance to get the rotation just-so. Same was with my old main mage during TBC end-game - I had barely even acknowledged spells like Polymorph or Remove Curse before I began raiding Karazhan!

The whole leveling stuff is to milk your monthly fees for a good 6-9 months before you can realistically hit level cap and begin raiding and these RAF & Heirloom & Wintergrasp +xp% bonuses are a way Blizz is trying to not kill the game a) for newcomers with a too long a grind (I've had two friends who both quit at abt. lv56 out of discust and boredom when TBC came out - took them a year to get there...) and b) try to cater for us veterans with a want to have a few alts to facilitate the grind with Heirlooms (that still require alot of PvP/HC's/grinding to get in the first place and are inaccessible for first timers. This ofc is nice that Blizz seems to listen to our QQ, but I'd still happily welcome more +xp gear - loved RAF to get my 8 alts up to lv61 in a flash (you can level your toon to 99,9% of your xp-bar and then grant levels to lv60 to them. The RAF level granter will just add a whole level to your character and not zero the accumulated xp %. Therefore you will end up with toons of level 60 with 99,9% of xp gathered and 1 killed boar will put you over to lv61 ;-) Worked wonders when I brought up my old trusty lv29 PvP rogue at 99% xp with grants to 60 and dinged to 61 with my first hellboar at the Honor Hold gates...