What hurt Cataclysm - more than anything - was the very slow pace of endgame development. Well, that coupled with the smaller amount of endgame zones compared to WotLK and TBC (that being due to them spending time and resources re-doing the leveling zones). Rep tabards were around in WotLK. Rep from dungeons - though not through tabards - was around in TBC. Dailies during those games were essentially centered around vanity rewards and just an extra way to make gold.
Most players play WoW for everything. They enjoy the questing, the dungeons and the raids. But, the questing comes with a caveat: the solo content is mastered and finished long before dungeons and heroics are, which in turn is mastered and finished long before raids are. And PvP - of course - is a never ending source of competition with other human beings.
MoP is trying to do something different with the solo content - make it so it takes far, far longer to "finish" in the mind of the player. The problem is that they're doing this not by adding new quest content at a faster pace, but merely by having people repeat the same quest content over and over again. Quest content already carries the burden of being generally unchallenging and rarely offering any variation on "kill this and collect that from those easy to kill mobs." It's advantages are in exploration (new terrain, new mobs) and lore. Those advantages are there for the one-time yellow exclamation mark quests. They disappear for daily quests the second time you get asked to do the same quest.
A game does a better service for its players when it doesn't try to extend the life of content beyond what it can sustain in engaging play. Blizzard is deciding not to do that service because they think it will keep subscription numbers higher (and perhaps because of the ego of some of the developers, who dislike the idea of players feeling "finished" with zones they put a lot effort into). Maybe they're right and it will keep numbers higher in the long term, maybe they're wrong and it will cause more burnout in the long term and make players less likely to buy into new expansions, but it's ridiculous for players to cheer them for it. No one should want lower standards of gameplay.