incorrect. TBC had excellent crafted gear for many slots at least for casters. You could pretty easily run Kara a few times, pop in some crafted gear and be reasonable in BT. Yes, you had to run some older raids, but that wasn't a huge hassle. What made it a hassle was that there was no badge gear until 2.4 and that the older raids were all 25 man. Newer players couldn't run through 10 man versions of SSC, BT etc to grab gear for Sunwell. After ZA you could do that, but not before.
If TBC had had 10 man versions of all of the raids and nothing more it would have been close to perfect.