Actually, the "wellfare epics" as you put them are precisely why I don't raid until the last tier of content has come out. When Cataclysm first launched, people asked why I wasn't raiding since I had all the best non-raid gear. Told them it wasn't worth the time, I'd just go work on alts. Then came the Zuls and within one raid lockout I had decked out in full 353's, almost as good as the months people had spent in raids. Then came Firelands, and they asked me why I wasn't raiding. Still not worth the time. Then the Twilights came out with gear every bit as good as normal mode Firelands.

Now that Dragon Soul is out, I'm raiding, and quite happy with my decision. The early raiders have one geared toon, I have six 85's with ilvl 380+ and maxed professions. Now I raid, because I know there isn't going to be a patch in a month or two that would completely invalidate all of the previous effort.

Its sort of sad, really. 2/3rds of the raid content this expansion I haven't even touched, and I have no desire to do so. Maybe one day the weekly raid will be updated to include these raids and I'll have reason to walk into one, but until then, I really don't care. The gear isn't even worth getting for transmog for me.

And yes, for me raiding is all about the gear. I don't care about the "thrill" of getting the boss down, I just want the shinies.

Wrath dungeons were no easier than Cata dungeons if you were wearing quest blues. The Cata trash packs were just a bit more annoying than they were in Wrath. The reason nobody remembers Wrath dungeons as being hard is because Naxx was so easy. Even the most casual of guilds were clearing Naxx literally weeks after reaching level 80, and then they all had i200 epics.

"And yes, for me raiding is all about the gear. I don't care about the "thrill" of getting the boss down, I just want the shinies."

That's your thing, and I can't fault you for it, but it's interesting how differently people can play this game. The thought of ignoring an entire raid tier just because a dungeon will have the same iLevel gear 6 months later is super foreign to me...

Some of the Wrath heroics were back-breakingly tough way back when. Loken, and Skadi being the ones I remember as the worst.

Wrath heroics in the beginning, were still pretty hard, but not many remember them cause a lot of people came to the game during Wrath. You used to do Vault( the wintergrasp raid) in all blue gear, even in 25 man. But as the expansion went on, epic gear became easier to get, badge gear, Trial of the Champion 5 man gave great gear, and people were blowing up old heroics. It really wasn't so much that Wrath heroics were easier, as it was people outgeared them pretty quick getting Vault and Naxx gear, and the later gear just made it that much more AoE fest.

The problem with the Cata heroics was that they were too hard for those that didn't know the old ways of doing heroics. They wanted players to use abilities to CC mobs like they did in BC, but too many new people didn't play during that period. And you add in the fact that the Cata Heroics didn't drop a single epic quality item, was a real downer, cause for those that were playing since at least BC, at the very least the last boss of the heroic should drop an Epic quality item. Didn't matter if the heroic blue that dropped would have been the same as the Epic one or not, people felt cheated going through all that hard work just to get more crappy blues. Perception's were already created, and they tried to change them, they lost a lot of people because of it.

The Dungeon Finder was the obvious difference.

I formed several pugs just to take down Skadi during Lunarfest a couple years back yet we simply could not do it, and so I missed out on the Lunarfest meta just because of that one elder. A year later, thanks to the DF, I was able to visit the elder--in heroic mode--without any difficulty whatsoever.

The DF allowed even us scrubby casuals to grab purple gear and rack up enough badges to buy even more, so we could blow through heroics before the 15-minute DF cooldown had expired.

That same speedy progression came to a halt in Cata, though, because there were no purples in the dungeons and badges were therefore much harder to acquire.