@Mork
I agree with you on parts of your statement. In vanilla and BC, you did not feel like you were left out if you were not raiding. They had enough stuff for you to do at end game that you could stay on the same char and make progress. Leveling alone could take a huge chunk of your time even before you got to the end game and then there were reps to grind, professions to complete, and long instances to run on normal that while they were a pain, the community that ran them were understanding. Don't know about this boss? Here, let me type it out to you b/c only raiders had Teamspeak back then and it was rarely used in 5 mans if at all (I honestly can't remember when Vent hit it big, late BC maybe?). Then Wrath hit and they sped up leveling. All of a sudden, you didn't spend 6 months leveling a char (might be exaggerating here as I was a slow leveler). You instead had them in Northrend in a month and Northrend itself only took 2 to 3 weeks before the nerfs to xp there. All of a sudden, you've got 4 months of extra time there. What are you going to do? PVP and raiding were the only real options. Hence that raiding all of a sudden became something that everyone did. Cata made the leveling even quicker. 1-80 takes 3 weeks and 81-85 takes another week. Now what are you going to do? Raiding and PVP are still the only 2 options so what can Blizz do to keep people subscribed? Make raiding easier is the only real thing they can do b/c as much as raiders complain, they have nothing on PVPers. Trust me on that one.