@bilbomoody

Raiders would be seeing the content anyway. The content itself is not the annoyance. If it were, they wouldn't be raiding.

The crux of the issue is that how achievements and the heroic versions of encounters are designed change the way you experience the content, and it's my argument that having to choose between the two (you really can't do both on most encounters while they're current) changes that experience in a way that isn't good for the game.

As I said, your ability to skip past the issue entirely at level 85 in heroic Icecrown is pretty much the point I'm trying to make. People returning to heroic Icecrown now aren't forced into that choice in the way that raiders at level 80 were, and you don't have to worry about rotating people in and out for achievements or heroics because you can do them both at the same time.

During Wrath, I literally kept a spreadsheet of guildies who needed, say, Full House versus the heroic version of Deathwhisper. We couldn't do them both in the same week, but at the same time, we wanted to get everybody their drakes. For anybody who needed to upgrade their gear from heroic Deathwhisper, though, this was enormously frustrating for every week that we had to delay, and on every encounter we had to downgrade to normal for that reason. The issue just restarted every time a new recruit was brought into the guild, because most of the time you don't get people who already had these achievements. Every achievement we had to do came at the opportunity cost of heroic gear that we needed for the heroic Lich King encounter.

So it's my conclusion that the Ulduar model was ultimately the best way to go. It didn't force guilds to choose between the achievement and the heroic version, because the achievement WAS the heroic version.