That's an excellent point, and not one I really intended to overlook in the column. I've been on both sides of the equation as both a hardcore raider, and then again as someone whose first experience with content was long past its "progression" status (at the moment, I'm the latter, consequence of RL issues).

I guess the problem for me, even as someone who often approaches content much later, is that something still feels a bit cynical about the way in which current raid and achievement design lengthens the experience of a raid. It extends the life of raid content in a fashion that's more annoying than it needs to be. Raiding achievements are a lot of fun, but I think the Ulduar model served the game better than the heroic/achievement/normal split we've got right now.

Nobody laughed at the difficulty of things like Knock, Knock, Knock On Wood, but at the same time, you didn't have the organizational nightmare of the normal/heroic split with a full complement of raiders who had to come in and out for whichever version of an encounter they were missing.