Well except for the supermodel girlfriend and the extra ".4" kid, you nailed it. Oh, I'll still sheep the mob (how did you know my main's a mage ...) BUT if you premise is (as it appears to be) that WoW should only be for people with countless hours to invest and us casuals should just get out, I think you're starting to see Blizzard's answer.
And in reply to the posted question from the article - you want HARD mode - do Dragon Soul on heroic. There's YOUR hard mode, for the rest of us the troll dungeons were hard enough. For those of you who need to validate your life with a video game, there ya go! For those of us trying to have a little escapist fun, the heroics are plenty hard enough.

"you want HARD mode - do Dragon Soul on heroic. There's YOUR hard mode, for the rest of us the troll dungeons were hard enough."

The problem is that getting into (just normal mode) Raids takes quite a lot of investment of time. I want an option where I can queue up and get a suitable level of challenge. The new 5-mans are depressingly easy, I think they can be completed without a wipe, with most people not knowing the strategies. LFR is (other than Spine/Madness of Deathwing) just as easy it seems - especially playing as a healer.

I've only been playing since the beginning of Cata, and the 5-mans up til now provided a good level of challenge, in a good amount of time.

The new 5-mans are quite fun, but there's no real sense of accomplishment at the end, I just do them because I feel I need to VP cap on each character or I'd be letting my raid team down.

I don't want you excluded from the game because you can't complete Zuls quick enough to make you happy. But I want some casual content for me to play that feels like a challenge and not just a grind. I dearly hope the challenge modes in MoP will bring it, but I worry that people will complain HC modes aren't enough end content and that challenge modes should be easily doable by people other than no-lifers.

It is generally understood that normal mode dungeons are there for people to experience content. In raiding, LFR mode provides the same.

So why is it, then, that heroic 5-man dungeons and normal and heroic raids have not gotten brutally difficult? With the introduction of LFR, I expected normal and heroic raids to be MUCH more difficult than T11 and T12. Normal raids should be nearly as difficult as heroic raids were, and heroic should be at LEAST as difficult as Sunwell. It boggles my mind that so many guilds steamrolled normal mode Dragon Soul in the first week.

LFR is for seeing content. Normal raiding is for a coordinated guild group. Heroic raiding is for people like me that enjoy wiping hundreds of times before downing a boss.

What I'm really interested in is Blizzard providing a reason for why normal and heroic T13 content is so easy when LFR was created for the express purpose of allowing people with little time to experience content.

So you work 32 hours a day and still find time to play wow Noel? How do you do it?

I'm not looking for heroic raid difficulty in five mans, but at the same time, I'd like something more challenging than the current incarnation of 5 mans which go so far as to tank the final boss for you.

And the "countless hours" argument is a strawman. It takes 15 minutes to look up a spec's spec, rotation, and stat priority, and it takes less than five minutes to get a rundown on every boss in an instance. You know what the best part is? It's a one time investment. Those 5 minutes will ensure that 95% of the complaints your getting in an instance will never happen again. People aren't spending countless hours studying for five mans. They've never spent hours studying for five mans. I guarantee that you've spent more time playing WoW than I have looking up five man bosses, by a massive margin. The next time you complain about someone expecting you to spend "countless hours" researching out of the game to prepare for an instance, keep in mind that they probably spent less time getting prepared than you spent complaining about how long it takes to get prepared.