"""
And Bril, you're not being fair. There are blue posts admitting that an unfortunate side-effect of the Azeroth revamp was less endgame content. It's a theme they hit over and over again at Blizzcon when discussing how Pandaland will be different from Cata. There was even an article on WoWI yesterday debating whether the tradeoff was necessary and whether the same needed to be done for Nrend and Oland. It's really not up for debate that there is less endgame content than there was previously- there's fewer factions, fewer 5-mans (even counting the revamps), fewer raids (including an entire canceled tier), fewer raid bosses, and even the rate between patches has been glacial.
"""

I don't think it should be a trade-off at all. Blizzard needed to revamp the old content not because current players were clamoring for it, but because WoW was becoming quite bad at retaining new players; trial players, after all, had only zones and quest lines mostly created in 2004 to play, and the age was showing in bad ways.

So, they did the revamp because the game needed it badly, allowing every player access to it even without purchasing any expansions at all, and peg it as a Cataclysm feature. I really don't see this as being honest with the players.

If the content that is only available to players who purchased Cataclysm is less than it should be, Blizzard should have admitted that they only had half an expansion, and charged for it accordingly.