With both of them raiding, and arena’ing its just hard to get a strong steady supply of income.

Especially when they’re both healers.

5. Heroics. Yes, some are a royal PITA if you don’t have the perfect class makeup, or great gear. But sometimes, be creative in your group.

Take Shattered Halls for example. Easily my most hated regular/heroic dungeon because of the massive pulls and annoying abilities and runners. It used to mean having a great tank, healer, and 3 reliable CC to get through it. One day some guildies decided to try something new. Took 2 feral druids, holy priest, moonkin and a hunter. Where’s the CC? (Aside from an unreliable trap). Both druids threw on tank gear, charged and swiped, each tanking 3 mobs, while the hunter picked them off one by one, priest keeping the bears healed, moonkin offhealing/dpsing. Total time for a heroic Shattered Halls clear: 40 minutes. Only thing faster would be a regular Black Morass. Mind you, our gear was decent at the time… Kara/Heroic epics. But hey, no group is going to survive any heroic if everyone is wearing quest rewards and greens. It took work gearing up in the regular instances before we could do any heroics with success.

4. Epic mount. Yes, after awhile it didn’t seem so epic since everyone had it. But hey, it’s still nice to have. With a riding crop, travel from point A to point B faster than the flightpaths. Not super hard for average joe to get the money to buy one… questing, dailies and casual farming… not buying useless greens from AH while leveling… doesn’t take super long to get one. Why would you want one? To go zoom zoom and be like everyone else.
As for epic requirements… not something everyone can enjoy, but the druid questline was alot of fun, and sort of made me feel like I earned that instant cast flight. Sure it wasn’t uber hard nor took more than a few hours, but it was something and it was enjoyable.

3. Time = Gear. For the most part, I agree. But the way you suggest fixing it for arena would keep the top teams top, and the bottom teams bottom. How are the bottom teams going to compete if they can’t keep their gear? Also up at the top wouldn’t it be even more pidgeonholed which teams you face? Go against one really annoying team you just can’t kill until you’ve lost enough rating and you can no longer use pieces of your gear thus making you keep falling?

2. Forums. Yes. They are crap. But hey, for the most part, the trolls and whiners have somewhere to go, and that leaves the serious forums where the real info is relatively free of that.

1. Trash. Trash sucks. Sometimes trash respawns means end of raid, or if timing is unlucky, wipe on a boss. But blizzard has made trash somewhat more reasonable with the VERY nice epics and patterns that drop from them. One SSC run, from Lurker trash through to Morogrim trash, we had 5 nether vortexes, 3 Epics and a pattern drop. Sure it doesn’t happen everyday, but it’s still gearing people up while we learn new bosses. Sometimes trash can serve as a “Get your head out of your butt” wakeup call that’s needed before you hit a boss. Not long ago we go and one shot Lurker. We’re feeling all cocky, people not paying attention, BAM 3 wipes on the trash on the way to Morogrim. People woke up, finished up the rest without a death, go in and one shot Morogrim. So sometimes trash helps.

Anyhow, just being a little bit of a devil’s advocate. I pretty much agree with what you’ve said; I just needed to put in some opposing ideas.