Regardless of what perceived skill you believe raiders require in order to defeat end game encounters, please keep in mind that raid encounters are high energy activities. People can get burned out from doing those sort of things very quickly, and the carrot on the stick method has the negative effect of encouraging a rather selfish side to players where they cease seeing themselves as part of a team, quickly becoming elitist in the worst possible ways.

Open world content is a good thing, but remember that over the last ten years very few developers have pushed forward in evolving open world content. The closest that comes to mind is Tabula Rasa followed by Guild Wars 2. Also, people are having issues competing for hunts because people are swarming these things like magpies. While that is understandably frustrating for us all, it also points to the fact that there is a significant audience for open world content as an alternative to the Linear smash-and-grab dungeons.