Tiered and gated content without any modes. First boss easy, last boss Sinestra. That and downsize to only 1 raid size, 15. Aint happening though >_<
Normal raids with hard modes (Dragon Soul)
Normal raids with interestingly unlocked hard modes (Ulduar/Sartharion)
No hard modes; different tiers (if fixed with LFR) (Karazhan/Black Temple/Gruuls/Magtheridon)
Other (state in post)
Tiered and gated content without any modes. First boss easy, last boss Sinestra. That and downsize to only 1 raid size, 15. Aint happening though >_<
I also really liked the different levels of Yogg, and I think that doing that for end bosses sometimes (you can't do it all the time or it because bland and boring) would be awesome. They even could have had something similar to that type of fight for Madness, since you have all those aspects, if we could have talked to them or disabled them to alter the fight (it would have to be something different than it ended up being, which would have been a good thing just on its own) then I think we could have ended up with a really epic fight that would have been worthy to close out the expansion. Ah, the "what-ifs" ...
And what you said about it feeling better to you is absolutely a valid point and opinion. I get that is why some people liked the way it was done, even though most of them really amounted to the same thing as flipping a switch. Its just when people say that they way of doing it was so much better or different that I disagree with, because it mostly wasn't.
I liked the way Ulduar did it, but it also led to some frustrating moments. Regardless, I found it more fun than just hitting a button in the ui like it is now.