While I DO raid, I certainly understand why a lot of folks would be turned off by it. No matter how good you are at a raid, unless you have seven partners who are ALSO good at the raid, you're going to beat your head against that raid over and over and over and over. Building a raid group is, hands-down the hardest part of raiding - WAY harder than actually running the raid is. I don't know the reason why some people simply can't learn to handle mechanics, whether they suffer lag, allow themselves to be distracted by stuff in real life, simply lack the competence to do it, or any combination of those, the fact is that those folks are out there.

So, what do you do when you wind up with someone who just can't cut it in your group? If your group is coldly professional, you drop them and get someone else. But then, you're in a coldly professional group, which lacks a lot of the joy you get when you're on a team full of buddies hanging out and having fun. If your group is a bunch of warm buddies having fun, on the other hand, it can be very hard to tell that weakest link that they have to leave. Then there's the rare team of warm buddies that HAS no weakest link - that's the ideal everyone aspires to, but it is so, so rare...

That, I think, is why the raiding community is as small as it is. The bulk of them are all business and there to get the job done, having ruthlessly culled any members that happen to fall short of their expectations, with a scattered few teams of buddy groups who happen to be lucky enough to have a full team of skilled players. Neither set is very keen on the idea of welcoming new members - they have a team that works, and so they're going to stick to it. This means that any new teams have to assemble themselves from the morass of wannabe raiders, and doing so is a long and frustrating process that drives many potentials with legitimate talent to simply give up.