Had nothing to do with dumbing down, it was extra steps for players to equip their new gear, it lessened the impact of getting new gear, instead of being happy and equipping your new gear and having fun with your new found power, you have to get gems for it, then enchant it, then reforge it usually using an addon, that's 3 extra steps involved instead of just equipping it, which is the primary purpose of getting gear... to be equipped.
Frequently new gear is sitting in players bags because they didn't want to bother with all the crap. I was watching Sco from Method's stream last night and he mentioned he's still using mastery gems because he hadn't bothered changing to parry/dodge.
Secondly how the fuck can you dumb down something that they added after the game started? Was Vanilla dumbed down? I don't recall reforging and regemming thunderfury and that was a god damn legendary.