I think roadblocks are important in the early game but become less important when there's three tiers of raids.
If they kept the roadblocks in place then, we'd be stuck with the TBC progression series. Some people loved that, but it's clearly not what Blizzard wants any more.

The biggest problem I see with late expansion fast gearing, is why not unsub after you reach level cap, wait till 2 or 3 months before the next xpac comes out, resub, run everything, see everything, get decked out in gear all in a month, then enjoy the leveling of the next xpac, and unsub and go play something else for the next X months?

If raiding is all you care about of course. If your a pvp player this doesn't work at all. If your an alt addict or achievement whore, this doesn't apply. But if your just a casual raider, all of the raids will be made easier by the end of the xpac, gearing won't be a hurdle, hell, you'll even have people that already know the strats.

The artificial limits of BC prevented this type of play. You had to be dedicated and you stick around for the duration if you wanted to see end game while its still relevant. But Wrath & Cata almost embrace it.

I enjoy that it doesn't take months to get an alt ready to raid. What I want to know is how many hours did you log onto your fresh 85 Death Knight before being able to tank DeathWing? It is duable in a week if you have the time and effort to log approx 4-6 hrs a night and constantly que for Randomn dungeon finder for instant tank spot to stack up the Justice points I understand. However for the non expert normal person I believe it will take a considerable longer time to get DS ready. DPS has the slowest curve due to the longer queue times for the Randomn dungeon finder. I think its working just fine. I would hate to spend 2-3 months before I can touch end game on a character.

Imnick...
I dont disagree to what you said, BUT... do you think its BLIZZARD that doesnt want this anymore? It seems to me like it's a large part of the playerbase that didn't exactly enjoy the changes to gearing and dungeon difficulty.
I mean, Blizz seemed very convinced about "heroics having to be very difficult" and "epics should feel epic again", but you soon had nerfs to those dungeons, then you could get epics as quest rewards (cloaks from the Thrall questline, even better cloaks after like 2 hours of random FL trash farming in a PUG, plus the MF-vendors we unlocked), and now it feels just like Wrath again, with the three new dungeons feeling a lot like the Wrath ones. So I think Blizzard did change their mind mainly because of what many players thought about the changes.

Krytture
Sure, good point, but then again, if you'd take that line of thinking to the extreme, why play it all, if you know that the gear you farm up now is obsolete once the next expansion or next tier comes out?
For a casual raiding guild (I am in one nowadays), its not bad at all to be able to gear up a bit quicker, as it gives the guild a bit more time to work on the raid content in decent gear. We are just now getting back into it, and are gearing up for it through the 3 new instances, VP/JP farming, LFR etc, so thats nice.

To both of you, I know what you mean though! =))

...AND I would be interested to hear how the author went about gearing as well!
Josh, did the DK have some JP/VP saved up? Since it was said he was dressed in blues, I assume he didn't do the MF-dailies either, so was it just farming normal and then heroic dungeons over and over for a day or two?

I would actually not say that it failed.
In Vanilla and more clearly in BC, Blizz figured out that going through all of the past raid content to gear up for current raid is quite impractical (to say the least) at the end of an expansion. It required longer and longer to get ready.
In Wrath, they fixed that by making gear acquisition scale with time (same content for new badges each new expansion). They also timidly tried out if adding easy content could work, introducing a first dungeon in 3.2 then 3 additional dungeons in 3.3. The problem there was that (i) people grew more than tired of most heroics and (ii) we were showered with epics.

In cataclysm, Blizzard probably never intended to put roadblocks to prevent gearing alts as suggested by the OP. They tried to limit epic accessibility in order to have people spend time *playing* dungeon content before raiding. Heroic dungeons would only give blue items but with the heroic badge. Then we could finally get back a sense of epicness with purple loot. Epics could still be bought using valor points, but it required more time than in Wrath.
That was successful and seeing purple gear in 4.0 was a sign of more dedication than in 3.0.

Then, in 4.1 and 4.3 they introduced new dungeons to ease gearing a new character up to raid-readiness. You seem to think that it's a sign that the system failed but that was probably their intention all along. In 4.1 they were able to deal out sub-T11 gear level which allowed raiding people not to feel offended. In 4.3 they decided to give T12 gear level in easy heroics. It's probably a bit too much and I'd venture to guess that it was a promotional offer to help LFR.

In any case, it allows people to hop in, spend a short time playing dungeons before being able to *play* with their friends. That's not a failure and it was the original intent.

The system achieves its goals but there are mainly two things that could be improved:
- keeping blues (with heroic tag) drop instead of purples in dungeons. That's what the raiding crowd wants and the non-raiders don't care much for color, only for ilvl (and LFR can get them some epics if they want, now)
- having a smoother dungeon path: 346 -> 353 -> 378 compared with 359 -> 378 -> 397 is not optimal: 372 would have been enough for 4.3 heroics and the difficulty of LFR could have accepted a ~365 barrier of entry (but it was probably a though out decision in order to increase the LFR success chances for launch).

"It seems to me like it's a large part of the playerbase that didn't exactly enjoy the changes to gearing and dungeon difficulty. "

Yeah, it's called quitting, which many of us did a year ago when running a heroic felt as enjoyable as ramming your head into a brick wall. Many did not get the message that WoW realized the error of its ways and returned to the Wrath model and still have yet to return. Maybe they'll never return, and whose fault is that? Blizz for making heroics so unfun, or the hardcore jerks who complained in the first place that Wrath had been too "easy"?

And I, too, would be interested in knowing how the OP geared up so quickly. I've run four DPSers through the Twilight 3 and into LFR but it took a few weeks worth of heroics to get each one up to the 372 required to enter the LFR. Most who had dinged 85 from questing had an average ilevel around 325, maximum, and had no chance at all of entering even the Twilight 3 without putting on several pieces of crafted PvP gear, which felt rather shameful to me.

Pesonally, I'd love to see this happen again. I'd like to gear slowly out the gate once I hit 90, and then scale up with raid content. That, combined with an overall stat-squish could really work in the game's favor come MoP, but perhaps that on top of the new talant overhaul would be both too much strain on the dev team and too much change for the playerbase to handle...

I don't think the roadblocks were intended for alts.

"I'd like to gear slowly out the gate..."

That zone was called Vash.

If you were a fresh 80, like a Worgen, the one thing you needed immediately when entering a dangerous new zone full of level 80 critters with scary levels of health and dps was new gear, yet the first dozen or so quests awarded cash only, like we were mercenaries. We want GEAR, dammit, not this yellow stuff! Yet gear was doled out so slowly that I gave up after several death runs due to eels or murlocs and went to Hyjal.

I've raised 8 characters to 85, and only one made it through Vash far enough to actually see the Earthen Ring quartermaster. And he stopped right there before heading off to Hyjal.

...and if you're wondering, it was a pally who entered Vash wearing some ICC purples who made it to the quartermaster. My worgen--who walked in with an iscore around 187, therefore turning her into sharkbait--gave up LOOOOONG before then.