Hasn't that been the case since the beginning of WoW?

You base that statment on what?

The 2.3% of guilds that downed all 13 encounters in T11 on heroic?
The 1.9% of guilds that killed heroic Lich King before cataclysm?
The 2.1% of guilds that got Tribute to Insanity before Cata?
The .02% of guilds that downed alone in the dark before ToC came out?

Welcome to raiding. The hardest challenge is rarified air.

It's an issue whether or not it was an issue in other expansions.
The previous raids have that issue too, if your non-sourced statistics are true.

Sure, that is what raiding is like, but that doesn't mean it's optimal, and it doesn't make 95% of the player-base happy. In WotLK I downed some bosses in your list, and didn't get others. It wasn't a great feeling knowing that my group wasn't good enough when we didn't get the last boss before the next content patch.

It's a problem to me, and I'm sure to a lot of people. I'm not saying it's a problem to you, and I don't know if it's a problem to Blizzard, I just hope it is.

Let me rephrase that.

There is no way in hell that the majority of the playerbase is having as much FUN as they could be. Not when 98% of them feel like they're not good enough / the bosses are too hard and they can't progress.

From what the devs have said, if you're in a regular raiding guild it's their intent that you generally finish regular mode before the next raid content patch.

It's very much not their expectation that anything like a plurality of raiders completes heroic mode in that same timespan.

I do find it interesting that GuildOx's numbers (however they're generated) say that nearly half (~48%) of raiding guilds are raiding heroic Firelands.

@Twill
I disagree that it's a problem. Heroic encounters, as other have said, are meant to be the hardest, most challenging content out there. And the last boss on Heroic is meant to be the test by which the best can measure themselves. If 40% of raiding guild downed Heroic Ragnaros by this time, I'd see that as a serious overnerf of the content.

Wowprogress has more accurate numbers, they do complete armory parses on occaision, whereas guildox and wowtrack still require manual input, and according to wowprogress, nearly 70% of guilds have cleared firelands normal and have the option to work on heroic, and 55% of guilds have at least heroic Shannox down. That's wildely out of the norm when compared to previous tiers. Not even ToGC had that many guilds downing bosses on heroic.

The other side of the question, though, is how many guilds raided before, and how many do raid in Cataclysm. I.e., if the raiding population is larger or smaller than before.

I have a gut feeling that the raiding population is significantly smaller - I know I have seen my share of stories about guilds that stopped raiding in Cataclysm, and it appears PUGs in most realms are also mostly non-existent, further reducing the chances of raiding - though I don't have any data to back that.

The baseline content is the Regular version of the raid encounter. They're meant for the majority, and for my casual 10man, that's good enough; we see the content, we get improved gear, we have fun.

We don't generally hit Heroic modes, and we're cool with that. They're the same fights with a couple extra mechanics. Most of my guild doesn't need to see more red and brown landscape and those bosses in a higher difficulty to feel like they got the whole story or saw all the content.

For bonus bosses, we still don't worry too much, and that tends to be something we go back and do later--as they're extra, not crucial to progression.

no its right hardest bosses should be hard killing them should be special and rare

This is HEROIC! Its meant to be balls-to-the-wall hard. If this were normal, like back in the days of vanilla or BC, where there was only one choice in the difficulty of your raid, then I could understand your complaint, but if so many more people complete what is supposed to be the most challenging thing in the game, then something's wrong. It's like my cousin, who loves fable and likes to claim that he's awesome because he can follow a golden trail and face an outrageous number of enemies, even though when he "dies" he just comes back to life and can keep fighting (I'm not saying fable isn't a good game. It's loads of fun). Let's keep rewarding people for their accomplishments by keeping them WORTHY of being accomplishments.

Go ahead, finish regular content. That's what it's for. As for heroic content, if you can't finish it, maybe it's not for you.