Disclaimer: "you" refers to anyone who is angry that this is 'catering to the casuals yet again, blizz is so fail'. Not sure this actually applies to you literally, anbilow, since your comment sounded pretty even-handed.


In order to gear for 4.0 raids, people grinded out Cataclysm heroics. In order to gear for 4.2 raids, what do people grind? The same heroics? Even using the Zandalari instances, spamming heroics isn't going to get you good enough gear, and it'll take forever to accrue enough VP to get 359's if the current VP gear isn't switched to JP. So, VP gear has been moved to JP vendors to make 5-man heroics relevant toward the 4.2 gearing process.

Addressing the nerfs to 4.0 raids, you should look at them as moving those raids towards a sort of "4.2 heroic dungeon" difficulty level. The logic remains: grind lower content to get gear for higher content. Even with the nerfs, raids require more people, skill, and coordination than 5mans, and for that reason they reward better "4.2 entry level" gear.