It sucks for those of us who can play a more challenging game, but when and where cash is king, accessibility will always be viewed as the best option. Why?
  • A skilled player can play any game an unskilled player can, but not the other way around. Easy game = larger potential audience = larger potential income
  • Can't make some classes 'hard' and others 'easy'. People who like the looks of a 'hard' class but are unable to play it well will nag to have changes made to make the class more accessible
  • We can't have different styles/specs of each class. If we did, those chasing the meta around will force near uniformity in end game content. Why? Easy gameplay reduces the odds of making a mistake, so you'll be forced into running the easy setup unless the hard setup increases DPS, in which case easy-mode players will be banned from participating in places where DPS is king. Either way the choice is effectively removed from the player (just like base attribute points). If there's ultimately not going to be diversity, why invest resources to have it at all?

Maybe, just maybe it could be possible to balance the multi-spec thing to have it be generally acceptable. If "easy mode" versions of jobs could theoretically reach something like 80% of the theoretical max output of the "hard mode", I suspect that more casual raiding groups might be open to allowing "easy mode" players that's doing close to that 80% than asking them to do "hard mode" and then not clearing because they only manage 50-60% (or less). Of course, we've all seen groups who refuse to recruit anyone who isn't a top-tier job for the raiding meta because the lower cap on max DPS tends to translate to "greater chance of failing DPS checks" in their minds.

I feel like no matter how it's balanced, it'll be hard for an actual choice to gain traction without proper transparency (e.g. in-game DPS meters, showing who's in easy/hard modes, showing groups which have cleared content while using one mode or the other). Granted, that's pretty much not going to happen as SE has made it very clear that they aren't going to add in-game DPS meters.