The gear makes it easier; who said anything about keeping it hard for yourself?
Oh, yeah I get that; I said earlier in this or other threads that that was the problem with the 'early roadblocks' of Elegon, Garalon and Horridon; they effectively invalidated raiding as a gearing path and pushed people down the alternate routes of dailies/rep grinds and Valor. But that ties in to the above - they did that, to get gear so they could go back and kill those bosses.Also, please note the context of my comment and the material quoted. By Blizzard's own admission, when you give people an opportunity to circumvent raiding the majority do (circumvent raiding). I dunno about you, but I'm not in the habit of circumventing things I find fun. Ergo, the logical conclusion to draw is that the majority of the player base do not raid for fun, the logical conclusion to draw then must be that they raid for loot; those really are the only two options (except masochism, but I refuse to believe the majority of players are masochists: see lack of tanks. =P).
That clearly hurt the repeatability of those bosses though, since players were already outgearing what they dropped in respect to getting ready for the next tier.