"Failure, Challenge and the Decline of WoW"

I don't feel like they've made any significant improvements to raiding since BC short of dps class balance (every spec isn't equal but generally you can bring a dps shaman and not feel like you've made some tremendous mistake whereas in BC of equally skilled/geared players shaman were generally just a buff class). I mean to run heroics which gave I think kara or just slightly under kara level gear via badges of justice/final boss epics you had to run the level 70 version of an instance like 10 times, which wasn't a pretty picture to begin with in the case of shattered halls. That way at least generally if you were running a heroic, the person was geared enough/experienced enough if not skilled enough to get through a heroic. You weren't constantly getting into heroic 5 mans you do as normals leveling up with some jackass in craftable pvp blues going "so I've never run this on normal where do we go?"

Then at least at the start most of the heroic bosses were actually difficult, generally there was a trash mob/pair of mobs that could roflstomp your tank in like a second flat if your healer and tank weren't on the ball (deathbots in mechanar, defenders in steamvault, etc) I'm quite willing to say voidwalker boss in mana tombs, pretty much ever sl boss, the final boss of shattered halls were harder than any heroic 5 man content I've seen in wrath/cata. Then to run kara you had to at least have run SL/Steamvaults/Arcatraz and Black Morass on normal and had some level 70 gear. To call kara/gruul/mag easy entry level content just reeks of wrath baby since you couldn't just waltz into kara with 9 other assholes in normal 5 man gear and expect to get past moroes if you even got past attumen, and even some of the decent vanilla raiding guilds I knew had difficulty getting past curator without farming gear. Then highking/gruul actually took a bit of coordination and unnerfed magtheridon was pretty heal intensive on top of needing a lot of coordination.

Although to be fair I'm not sure if you'd say this would be a good or bad thing, but if they did things in cata how they did them in BC plaguechill would've been the only guild on the server that could run firelands for months because everyone else on the server would be trying to kill sinestra to finish their attunements to get INTO firelands, like how you had to kill kael'thas and vashj to open up hyjal and then do the first boss of hyjal to open BT, even though kael'thas was for the gear level you could have before BT/hyjal probably the hardest pre-sunwell boss in BC and compared to several BT/hyjal bosses vashj was no slouch either.

Which for imo pros and cons of the old system, pros-people either got worth a damn at the game, or they were stuck doing normal 5 mans for long enough that you probably wouldn't have to see them if you were weren't behind the raiding curve. cons-the personal attunement system had a tendency to bite perfectly qualified raiders/entire guilds in the ass from time to time since I remember having to do stupid shit like find a guild that was 5/6 in SSC, and either straight up pay them, or do something like bring 2-3 of their raiders to our next hyjal clear and give them a few pieces, so that we could use their lockout to get 1-2 people their hyjal attunement without having to dedicate half of our raid time the next week full clearing SSC