@captgrudge

Well, as the raid leader for my band of intrepid-but-unprogressed raiders, I'd be happy to offer up some insight as to how it happens.

-Inconsistent attendance. If everyone who had the rank of "raider" in our guild was on for every raid, we'd be doing 25m raiding. But we generally have ~7 consistent people, and then another 5 who cycle through those remaning slots any given week. Why? Life just kicks your butt sometimes. Gather up your real-life buddies and see if you can find one night a week that you can get together and have everyone show up consistently. That starts becoming very difficult once that group starts having gainful employment, getting married, and having kids.

-Lack of practice. If we don't have a full guild group, we don't go to Firelands. This probably hurts our progression, since we don't get to see the fights as often. But the alternative is not that great. Pugging for just 1 boss generally means being laughed at in trade chat for being, as people keep saying "bads," while getting raiders who just aren't geared for Firelands asking to go because they know the fights on their other toons. It hurts morale to cancel a raid night, but it's just as bad to spend half your night finding people to fill the empty slot and then make no progress anyhow.

-Difficulty of recruitment. It's been mentioned by the columnists on this site frequently, but guild recruitment has been pretty tough since the release of Cataclysm. I can only speculate as to why. But we've had people who, for example, joined the guild, signed up for every available raid on the calendar, then quit the same day. Is it the player or the guild? I don't know, but it's not a recruiter's market out there.

-Reticent raiders. When I post the raid schedule, I point out which bosses we'll be doing and ask raiders to get up-to-date on strategies for those encounters ahead of time. I've asked my raiders to read up on their specs for the best gearing/rotation/glyphs/etc. They don't always do this stuff. I know it hurts our progression sometimes. But . . .

-Irreplaceable raiders. Remember the part about the recruitment above? I couldn't replace that guy doing 12k DPS if I wanted to. Yeah, we'd probably do better if we weren't staffing a 10m raid with 3 paladins, 3 druids, and 2 hunters, but again, recruitment. Plus, these are long-standing guild members who have done a lot for us. I can't really say, "Yes, you played a huge part in helping the guild with [insert achievement here] but I'm cutting you from the raid team because we really need a mage."

So, there's some insight. Yeah, we're not making the cut for Ensidia anytime soon, but there's a lot of other issues stacking up. But we've stuck it out, and will continue to do so, because we like playing together and have made a good environment for it. Encounter nerfs mean we, and guilds with similar issues, don't have to content ourselves with steamrolling T11 on those nights that nothing is working.