The game is more dead than it was pre-3.1

[Lambdafish]

I think you are wrong there. Catch up patches are for mainstream players to prevent the playerbase from being spread too thinly across the game. I actually think that opposing catch up to protect the fragile egos of raiders who can't stand the idea that other players will have similar gear for less effort. I can't believe that any self respecting raider cares, or needs gear separation to differentiate themself from other players, or to validate their effort and achievement. Wanting that separation to be prolonged for ego reasons, which seems to be your point, strikes me as pure entitlement.

shots fired or at least they would be if I had even beaten A1S. No, I'm talking from a game design perspective and the value of content. The balance that needs to be made in MMOs is that relevant content needs to stay relevant, and raid content is one of the hardest pieces of content to keep relevant due to difficulty and accessibility. The point is, if the reward for raiding isnt more than anything else in the game(with a few exceptions) then the raiding scene dies, because it really isnt worth the effort invested. This was seen in 3.1 when Alex Savage completely died as everyone flooded to get their gear from the diadem instead. This was seen in 2.3 to a lesser extent as well with hunts.

So, thanks for assuming that im ego driven and that I only care about my precious entitlement, when actually I care about the health of this game and the balance of gear progression and how the game handles difficulty/reward given, because how that is handled seeps into every part of the game, especially player mentality.