Confirmation window for talent respecs in 3.1
It hasn't been widely publicized, but in 3.1 there is a UI option to not spend all of your talent points until you hit a "Confirm" button. Because you aren't actually spending the points, it is also really fast to add ranks or remove them. We default the tool off since having to confirm every single point you spend while leveling is kind of a drag. It's quite useful at level 80 though. (Source)

Tanking Ulduar Encounters
Every fight in Ulduar has so far been tanked by all 4 tanking classes and we haven't seen any situations where one class is at such a disadvantage that they are in danger of losing their raid or guild spot. We'll continue to keep a close eye on it though and make sure that through some clever new mechanic or combination of gear that nobody manages to trivialize the encounter when tanking with a particular class. (Source)

Multiple difficulty levels in instances - Elite Mode?
That is kind of what we are trying to do with the hard modes in Ulduar. If they work out well, I could totally see selecting 3 or 4 difficulty levels when you zone in rather than just 10 vs. 25. (Source)

The evolution of WoW players
While we obviously disagree on WoW being dead, you make one point I wanted to echo which is that the average raider (or at least players interested in end-game content) are more sophisticated now. The game's community has matured as the game has matured. There are so many information sites out there with a great deal of depth. In the MC days, nobody had Deadly Boss Mobs or Omen (though we did have Decursive). You didn't link videos before your boss attempt. Half your group probably didn't know about the EJ website and there was no AJ. Players figured out what worked for them and focused less on optimization because there was no gigantic community out there advising them on how to optimize. I'm not saying that kind of community progression was a bad thing at all. But it definitely changes the experience. (Source)

Balancing all specs to make them viable
At a high level, you can design an RPG in two ways. You can have relatively few roles or you can have a lot of roles. However, even when you have a lot of roles, they tend to overlap a ton and have some very flimsy differences between some of the roles. So more realistically, you can have a few choices to fill your roles or a lot of choices to fill your roles.

You could make a game like WoW with a tank, healer, and maybe a melee and ranged dps class. Four roles. Four classes. It would work.

WoW however needs to last for a long time. It has already lasted a lot longer than many games, but because we have so many players, we need to keep designing a game to keep them interested. Adding new classes is one great way to do that. This time our class filled the tanking and dps role. Next time it might be a healer.

When you say "stop making every spec viable" usually what you are really saying is "let's have a game with less breadth and maybe more depth." That is definitely a way to design a game. But the breadth is also one of those things that provides options. To give just one example, if you get bored of your priest in WoW maybe you decide to roll up a warlock. Yeah you both use mana and wear cloth, but beyond that the classes start to diverge in what we hope are pretty interesting ways. If you have fewer specs or classes, then the reroll situation is a lot less compelling. (Source)

Paladin (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Retribution before WotLK
The problem with Ret was say a typical BC melee group had 2 rogues, a druid, a shaman and a warrior. (It could easily have 3 rogues too.) Yet the Ret needed all of those buffs to be decent. Stick the Ret with the casters, and the Ret buffs are wasted and the casters aren't helping her dps much. You could boot a rogue or maybe one of the others from the melee group, but your dps would likely still suffer. The old model was to bring the people to do the job (rogues in this case) and the people to buff them. Part of the move to having more raid buffs and fewer unique buffs was to solve this kind of jigsaw puzzle problem. The challenge should be fighting the bosses, not building the group in some kind of weird Tetris minigame. (Source)

Shaman (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Totem Stomping Macros
We don't like totem stomping macros and we are taking steps to prevent them. Because of technical limitations, these changes probably won't be in place for 3.1. But we will get them in place soon. (Source)