And how much do you get paid for your hobby?
Progression lasts a couple of weeks. Maybe a little longer some tiers. Farm can easily be done whilst working full time hours.
Especially if you do freelancer work, work from home, or work a job that isn't particularly affected by what time of day you do the work.
Progression last more than 'a couple of weeks'. The 1st week before mythic has to count since they're raiding hardcore then in split runs. Then 2 weeks of REALLY hardcore progress on mythic bosses. That's not to say though that, by and large, they likely spend less time on progress than most guilds do if you think about it. 2-3 weeks hardcore against some guilds months on the same bosses vs time spent.
Seems Method moved to 4/13.
Lets get back to topic, Method is 4/13 now, it does seem like it was a wall for them.
PTR tests last like......1-2 hours per boss.
You don't need to do all that much. You don't level characters unless you're testing a new expansion and max level templates are disabled. You don't need to farm for anything, flaskataur provides all your stuff.
PTR testing is gonna be what........60 hours total boss testing time for the whole tier. Maybe not even that.
Midwinter 5/13 it seems.
There are definite RNG (who gets focussed for dmg buff) and comp (no. of spriest / boomkin / lock) considerations around Council. I wouldn't read toooo much into the different times it takes guilds to kill that boss until you can see raid comp on wowprogress.