Haha yes really. Let's be willing to call a spade a spade: when you design a unique in-game model whose only purpose is to look cool and be sold to people, that's a money grab. HotA definitely wasn't put in the game for gameplay reasons. The dragon is only tenuously tied to lore. I don't think the designers put it in the game for the sheer joy of making it. Face it: HotA was placed in the gaming code solely to make Blizzard more money.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm fairly satisfied with WoW in general, and it's Blizzard's game and they're free to charge whatever they want to whoever they want (obviously people have no qualms about plunking down twenty-five dollars for an in-game mount). But when they introduce an entire raid tier with barely any original character models*, you'll excuse me if my reaction is a bit cynical when one of the prettier models they create turns out to be a real-money mount, and then they couldn't be assed to make sure the thing can actually land.

*let's see, Spine of Deathwing, his head, wing and limb tentacles during Madness, and oh everything else is a reskin or rehash!