Motivation for raiding

[TallonOverworld]

It's true that a high percentage of players is not raiding but not necessarily due to the lack of skill. Personally, i find raiding to be extremely stressful from my small experience. Also, the gear is indeed the best in terms of stats but why should i bother with raiding when i can get second best just by waiting a few weeks with tomes? Last week i got my shire weapon and finished shire armor. In 3.5 i will get each piece to i270 and even though it will take some time, im more than fine with that not to mention that my gear will be comparable to the raid gear in terms of basic stats which is all i want in the first place.
So even if SE decides to raise the gap between tome gear and raid gear it will end up badly since the vast majority of people that dont raid will complain about it and i don't believe they are willing to satisfy the needs of the few to the needs of the many, marketing thinking always

[Sarcatica]

It's true that a high percentage of players is not raiding but not necessarily due to the lack of skill. Personally, i find raiding to be extremely stressful from my small experience.

I beg to differ on the "lack of skill". DPS discrepancy is huge on each job. The same job can do as high as 3k dps, and as low as 300 dps. A DPS job can often do way less damage than a tank/healer does which is a bizarre occurrence. And it has become a "stigma" for basically any player with low DPS output, which normally is way off from the standard the general players should do. In a raid environment, you are required to at least know 60-80% of your basic DPS rotation to clear, the more the better and most players seemingly fail at this department very often.

Stress is sadly unavoidable in a harsher environment. This is mainly due to how the environment is designed around tighter checks, the requirement is tuned much higher which contributes to having to perform better and better to improve the rate of success. Mostly performance issue is what leads to stress. The argument on stress can be bad and/or good depending on how you see the situation.