Well, it is good exp when leveling.
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In reality, it will play out like this:
"Oh you don't want to let me play at the level I'm comfortable with because i progressed too far through your story? No sub for me."
The fact that players are "exploiting the system" in this manner indicates that they prefer the easier old school raids. The alternative is to dial the difficulty down on the current raids to bring them in line with the older, more reasonable difficulties of years past. If there wasn't a significant critical mass of players that was queueing for the easier content, you wouldn't see this phenomenon.
If you want to queue for on-level content, do so outside of the roulette. The purpose of the roulette is to give newer players who are still working through the content a chance to clear that conent without having to wait in the party finder for hours for someone to deign to group with them. It gives the veterans an incentive to help out random strangers who are still leveling through the game. If I want to run a level 90 raid, I'll queue for it, start a new run on the party finder, or find an existing run on the party finder. I don't go to the (random) duty roulette expecting to zone into Pandemonium. There's even a roulette option for players who prefer the harder content, and it's the expert roulette.
To me it looks like some players are simply complaining that the roulette is providing end game players with an alternative to running extremes and savages. If they want to play a game that punishes players for not try harding the game enough, then WoW may be their cup of tea.
It's not a matter of later raids being difficult, none of the later alliance raids are that hard nor are "expert" dungeons, it's players being lazy. How about if someone only wants to run CT, they can queue for it directly and stop ruining alliance roulette with ilvl cheesing. There's nothing try hard about expecting people to put in a modicum of effort.
After reading through the thread more, I do agree Square exacerbated the issue by making the CT raids required for the MSQ and an option for the ShB relic. I can't think of any easy solutions for this other than making the rest of the alliance raids mandatory as well (would prefer if they didn't though, side content should just remain optional imo). Maybe they can at certain points they can somehow inform players of their existence. At the very least, please fix the ilvl cheese, even if it means only 1 less CT raid a month.
Thordan EX seems like a poor measure for comparing how long a fight takes due to equipment. 90% of the running time is waiting for a fixed sequence of attacks and events to play out, most of them to be dodged rather than defeated.
If you're signing up for the roulette then it is not putting you anywhere against your will, because by signing up for it you've agreed to be placed into any alliance raid where you are needed.
As you said yourself:
If that is the purpose of the roulette, then deliberately locking yourself out of being available to help fill the higher levels of the roulette is defeating the purpose of it. The people queuing for Dun Scaith and Paradigm's Breach need those veterans' help more urgently than the ones queuing for Syrcus where everyone in the roulette is eligible to join them.
If they force people to do the higher tier raids without giving them higher tier rewards then people are just not going to do the alliance roulette.
Similar arguments were made regarding making the cutscenes be unskippable in MS Roulette. Look how that one goes...always has people doing it, most of the time nobody new to the instances. Though, due to the vast difference in EXP from one to the other, people tend to leave the shorter one more often.