@Microtonal

The reason why they went to a ui based toggle was because some of the switches were rather annoying.

Sure, they were cool at first, but then there were several feats of annoyance which convinced me that it was a less than ideal idea.

I was helping out a friend's guild. I was tanking in the arena on thorim, and the gauntlet group was pushing it. Thorim jumps down, and yells something, and one of the raid members said, "Never heard him say that before...". "That's cause you activated hard mode, dumbass. Ugly wipe ensued.

General Vezax. We stood around for damn near three minutes, waiting for hard mode to start. We couldn't DPS, or we'd kill him. We actually had a few melee DPS excuse themselves to use the bathroom mid fight.

Hodir Hard Mode. When it was progression, we'd have to set up markers, and if we weren't past the marker when the we hit a time check, then we'd wipe it, rather than risk accidently killing him a second late, and missing out for a week.

The unresetable nature of Flame Leviathan, Freya, and Yogg. Once you toggled to easy mode, by god, you were going to do easy mode. no second guessing for you!

Accidently popping the heart on the third heart phase on XT. Fail.

Pretty much the only "organic" toggle in ulduar that weren't flawed were Iron Council, and Mimiron. And Mimiron was an actual button you pushed before the fight, a literal UI toggle.

That being said, I think the Sarth, FL, Freya, IC, and Yogg ideas of multiple degrees of hard mode was a great idea. Just the implementation needed work.